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The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol. I

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Title: The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol. I

Author: Thomas Carlyle
        Ralph Waldo Emerson

Editor: Charles Eliot Norton


        
Release date: October 3, 2004 [eBook #13583]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13583


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THOMAS CARLYLE AND RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1834-1872, VOL. I ***

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF THOMAS CARLYLE AND RALPH WALDO EMERSON

1834-1872

VOLUME I.


"To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter.
It is a spiritual gift, worthy of him to give, and of me to
receive."--Emerson

"What the writer did actually mean, the thing he then thought of,
the thing he then was."--Carlyle



EDITORIAL NOTE

The  trust of editing the following Correspondence, committed to
me several years since by the writers, has been of easy
fulfilment.  The whole Correspondence, so far as it is known to
exist, is here printed, with the exception of a few notes of
introduction, and one or two essentially duplicate letters.  I
cannot but hope that some of the letters now missing may
hereafter come to light.

In printing, a dash has been substituted here and there for a
proper name, and some passages, mostly relating to details of
business transactions, have been omitted.  These omissions are
distinctly designated.  The punctuation and orthography of the
original letters have been in the main exactly followed.  I have
thought best to print much concerning dealings with publishers,
as illustrative of the material conditions of literature during
the middle of the century, as well as of the relations of the
two friends.  The notes in the two volumes are mine.

My best thanks and those of the readers of this Correspondence
are due to Mr. Moncure D. Conway, for his energetic and
successful effort to recover some of Emerson's early letters
which had fallen into strange hands.
                       --Charles Eliot Norton

Cambridge, Massachusetts
January 29, 1883

---------


NOTE TO REVISED EDITION

The hope that some of the letters missing from it when this
correspondence was first published might come to light, has been
fulfilled by the recovery of thirteen letters of Carlyle, and of
four of Emerson.  Besides these, the rough drafts of one or two
of Emerson's letters, of which the copies sent have gone astray,
have been found.  Comparatively few gaps in the Correspondence
remain to be filled.

The letters and drafts of letters now first printed are those
numbered as follows:--

Vol. I.
   XXXVI.  Carlyle
   XLI.    Emerson
   XLII.   Carlyle
   XLVI.    "
   XLVII.   "
   LXVIII.  "

Vol. II.
   C.     Emerson
   CIV.   Carlyle
   CV.       "
   CVI.      "
   CVII.     "
   CVIII.    "
   CIX.      "
   CXII.     "
   CXVI.     "
   CXLIX.  Emerson
   CLII.     "
   CLXV.     "
   CLXXXVI.  "

Emerson's letter of 1 May, 1859 (CLXIV.), of which only fragments
were printed in the former edition, is now printed complete, and
the extract from his Diary accompanying it appears in the form in
which it seems to have been sent to Carlyle.

                                      --C.E.N.

December 31, 1884

-----------


CONTENTS OF VOLUME I.

Introduction.  Emerson's early recognition of Carlyle's genius.
--His visit at Craigenputtock, in 1833.--Extracts concerning it
from letter of Carlyle, from letter of Emerson, and from English
Traits.

I. Emerson.  Boston, 14 May, 1834.  First acquaintance with
Carlyle's writings.--Visit to Craigenputtock.--_Sartor Resartus,_
its contents, its diction.--Gift of Webster's _Speeches_ and
Sampson Reed's _Growth of the Mind._

II. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 12 August, 1834.  Significance of
Emerson's gift and visit.--Sampson Reed.--Webster.--
Teufelsdrockh, its sorry reception.--Removal to London.--Article
on the Diamond Necklace.--Preparation for book on the French
Revolution.--Death of Coleridge.

III. Emerson.  Concord, 20 November, 1834.  Death of his brother
Edward.--Consolation in Carlyle's friendship.--Pleasure in
receiving stitched copy of Teufelsdrockh.--Goethe.--
Swedenborgianism.--Of himself.--Hope of Carlyle's coming to
America.--Gift of various publications.

IV. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 3 February, 1835.  Acknowledgments and
inquiries.--Sympathy for death of Edward Emerson.--Unitarianism.
--Emerson's position and pursuits.--Goethe.-Volume of French
Revolution finished.--Condition of literature.--Lecturing in
America.--Mrs. Austin.

V. Emerson.  Concord, 12 March, 1835.  Appreciation of Sartor.
--Dr. Channing.--Prospect of Carlyle's visit to America.--His
own approaching marriage.--Plan of a journal of Philosophy in
Boston.--Encouragement of Carlyle.

VI. Emerson.  Concord, 30 April, 1835.  Apathy of English public
toward Carlyle.--Hope of his visit to America.--Lectures and
lecturers in Boston.--Estimate of receipts and expenses.--Esteem
of Carlyle in America.

VII. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 13 May, 1835.  Emerson's marriage.
--Astonishing reception of Teufelsdrockh in New England.
--Boston Transcendentalism.--Destruction of manuscript of
first volume of _French Revolution._--Result of a year's
life in London.--Wordsworth.--Southey.

VIII. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 27 June, 1835.  Visit to America
questionable.--John Carlyle.--Tired out with rewriting _French
Revolution._--A London rout.--O'Connell.--Longfellow.--Emerson
and Unitarianism.

IX. Emerson.  Concord, 7 October, 1835.  Mrs. Child.--Public
addresses.--Marriage.--Destruction of manuscript of _French
Revolution._--Notice of _Sartor_ in _North American Review._
--Politics.--Charles Emerson.

X. Emerson.  Concord, 8 April, 1836.  Concern at Carlyle's
silence.--American reprint of _Sartor._--Carlyle's projected
visit.--Lecturing in New England.

XI. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 29 April, 1836.  Weariness over _French
Revolution._--Visit to Scotland.--Charm of London.--Letter from
James Freeman Clarke.--Article on _Sartor_ in _North American
Review._--Quatrain from Voss.

XII. Emerson.  Concord, 17 September,1836.  Death of Charles
Emerson.--Solicitude concerning Carlyle.--Urgency to him to come
to Concord.--Sends _Nature_ to him.--Reflections.

XIII. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 5 November, 1836.  Charles Emerson's
death.--Concord.--His own condition.--_French Revolution_ almost
ended.--Character of the book.--Weariness.--London and its
people.--Plans for rest.--John Sterling.--Articles on Mirabeau
and the _Diamond Necklace._--Mill's _London_ Review.--Thanks for
American Teufelsdrockh.--Mrs. Carlyle.--Might and Right, Canst
and Shalt.--Books about Goethe.

XIV. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 13 February, 1837.  Teufelsdrockh in
America and England.--_Nature._--Miss Martineau on Emerson.
--Mammon.--Completion of _French Revolution._--Scheme of
Lecturing in London.--America fading into the background.

XV. Emerson.  Concord, 31 March, 1837.  Receipt of the Mirabeau
and Diamond Necklace.--Their substance and style.--Proof-sheet of
_French Revolution._--Society in America.--Renewed invitation.
--Mrs. Carlyle.--His son Waldo.--Bronson Alcott.--Second edition
of _Sartor._

XVI. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 1 June, 1837.  Lectures on German
Literature.--Copy of _French Revolution_ sent.--Review of himself
in _Christian Examiner._--George Ripley.--Miss Martineau and her
book on America.--Plans.

XVII. Emerson.  Concord, 13 September, 1837.  _The French
Revolution._--Sale of Carlyle's books.--Lectures.

XVIII. Emerson.  Concord, 2 November, 1837.  Introduction given
to Charles Sumner.--Reprint of _French Revolution._--Lectures.

XIX. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 8 December, 1837.  Visit to Scotland.
--Mrs. Carlyle's ill-health.--His own need of rest.--John
Sterling; his regard for Emerson.--Emerson's Oration on the
American Scholar.--Proposed collection of his own Miscellanies.

XX. Emerson.  Concord, 9 February, 1838.  Lectures on Human
Culture.--Carlyle's praise of his Oration.--John Sterling.
--Reprint of _French Revolution._--Profits from it.--American
selection and edition of Carlyle's _Miscellanies._

XXI. Emerson.  Boston, 12 March, 1838.  Sale of _French
Revolution._--Arrangements concerning American edition of
_Miscellanies._

XXII. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 16 March, 1838.  Prospect of cash from
Yankee-land.--Poverty.--American and English reprints of
_Miscellanies._--Sterling's _Crystals from a Cavern._--Miss
Martineau on Emerson.--Lectures.--Plans.

XXIII. Emerson.  Concord, 10 May, 1838.  American edition of
_Miscellanies._--Invitation to Concord.--His means and mode of
life.--Sterling.--Miss Martineau.--Carlyle's poverty.

XXIV. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 15 June, 1838.  American _French
Revolution._--London edition of Teufelsdrockh.--Miscellanies.
--Lectures, their money result.--Plans.--Emerson's Oration.
--Mrs. Child's _Philothea._

XXV. Emerson.  Boston, 30 July, 1838.  Encloses bill for L50.
--_Miscellanies_ published.

XXVI. Emerson.  Concord, 6 August, 1838.  Publication of
_Miscellanies._--Two more volumes proposed.--Orations at
Theological School, Cambridge, and at Dartmouth College.--Carlyle
desired in America.

XXVII. Carlyle.  Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, 25 September, 1838.
Visit to his Mother.--Remittance from Emerson of L50.--
_Miscellanies_ again.--Another Course of Lectures.--Sterling.--
Miss Martineau.

XXVIII. Emerson.  Concord, 17 October, 1838.  Business.--Outcry
against address to Divinity College.--Injury to Carlyle's repute
in America from association with him.--Article in _Quarterly_ on
German Religious Writers.--Sterling.

XXIX. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 7 November, 1838.  Emerson's letters.--
Dyspepsia.--Use of money from America.--Arrangements concerning
publication of _Miscellanies._--Emerson's Orations.--Tempest in a
washbowl concerning Divinity School Address.--John Carlyle--
Postscript by Mrs. Carlyle.

XXX. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 15 November, 1838.  Arrangements
concerning Miscellanies.--Employments, outlooks.--Concord not
forgotten, but Emerson to come first to England.--John Carlyle.
--Miss Martineau and her books.

XXXI. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 2 December, 1838.  Arrival of American
reprint of _Miscellanies._--English and American bookselling.--
Proposed second edition of _French Revolution._--Reading Horace
Walpole.--Sumner.--Dartmouth Oration.--Sterling.--Dwight's
German Translations.

XXXII. Emerson.  Concord, 13 January, 1839.  Business.--
Remittance of L100.--Lectures on Human Life.--Dr. Carlyle.

XXXIII. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 8 February, 1839.  Acknowledgment of
remittance.--Arrangements for new edition of _French
Revolution._--London.--Wish for quiet.--Ill-health.--Suggestion
of writing on Cromwell.--Mr. Joseph Coolidge.--Divinity School
Address.--Mrs. Carlyle.--Gladstone cites from Emerson in his
Church and State.

XXXIV. Emerson.  Concord, 15 March, 1839.  Account of sales.--
Second series of _Miscellanies._--Ill wind raised by Address
blown over.--Lectures.--Birth of daughter.--_The Onyx Ring._
--Alcott.

XXXV. Emerson.  Concord, 19 March, 1839.  Need of copy to fill
out second series of _Miscellanies._--John S. Dwight.

XXXVI. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 13 April, 1839.  Solicitude on account
of Emerson's silence.--Gift to Mrs. Emerson.--Book business.
--New edition of _French Revolution._--New lectures.--Better
circumstances, better health.--Arthur Buller urges a visit to
America.--Milnes.--Emerson's growing popularity.

XXXVII. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 17 April, 1839.  Nothing in manuscript
fit for _Miscellanies._--Essay on Varnhagen.--Translation of
Goethe's _Mahrchen._--Cruthers and Jonson.--Dwight's book.
--Lectures.--Discontent among working people.

XXXVIII. Emerson.  Boston, 20 April, 1839.  Proposals of
publishers concerning _French Revolution._--Introduction of
Miss Sedgwick.

XXXIX. Emerson.  Concord, 25 April, 1839.  Account.--Sales
of books.

XL. Emerson.  Concord, 28 April, 1839.  Proposals of publishers
and accounts.

XLI. Emerson.  Concord, 15 May, 1839.  Arrangements with
publishers.--Matter for completion of fourth volume of
_Miscellanies._--Stearns Wheelers faithful labor.--Arthur
Buller's good witnessing.--Plans for Carlyle's visit to America.
--Milnes.--Copy of _Nature_ for him.

XLII. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 29 May, 1839.  Lectures happily over.--
Sansculottism.--Horse must be had.--Extempore speaking an art.--
Must lecture in America or write a book.--Wordsworth.--Sterling.
--Messages.

XLIII. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 24 June, 1839.  Delay in arrival of
_Miscellanies._--Custom-house rapacities.--Accounts..--No longer
poor.--Emerson's work.--Miss Sedgwick.--Daniel Webster.--Proposed
visit to Scotland.--Sinking of the Vengeur.

XLIV. Emerson.  Concord, 4 July, 1839.  Proof-sheet of new
edition of _French Revolution_ received.--Gift to Mrs. Emerson of
engraving of Guido's Aurora.--Publishers' accounts.--Sterling.--
Occupations.--Margaret Fuller.

XLV. Emerson.  Concord, 8 August, 1839.  _Miscellanies_ sent.
--Daniel Webster.--Alcott.--Thoreau.

XLVI. Carlyle.  Scotsbrig, Ecclefechan, 4 September, 1839.
Rusticating.--Arrival of _Miscellanies._--Errata.--Reprint of
_Wilhelm Meister._--Estimate of the book.--Copies of _French
Revolution_ sent.--Eager expectation of Emerson's book.--
Sterling.--Plans.

XLVII. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 8 December, 1839.  Long silence.--Stay
in Scotland.--Chartism.--Reprint of _Miscellanies._--Stearns
Wheeler.--_Wilhelm Meister._--Boston steamers.--Speculations
about Hegira into New England.--Visitor from America who had
never seen Emerson.--Miss Martineau.--Silence and speech.--
Sterling.--Southey.--No longer desperately poor.

XLVIII. Emerson.  Concord, 12 December, 1839.  Copies of _French
Revolution_ arrived.--Lectures on the Present Age.--Letter from
Sterling, his paper on Carlyle.--Friends.

XLIX. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 6 January, 1840.  _Chartism._--
Sterling.--Monckton Milnes, paper by him on Emerson.

L. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 17 January, 1840.  Export and import of
books.--New editions.--Books sent to Emerson.--Cromwell as a
subject for writing.--No appetite for lecturing.--Madame Necker
on Emerson.

LI. Emerson.  New York, 18 March, 1840.  New York.--Loss of faith
on entering cities.--Margaret Fuller to edit a journal.--Lectures
on the Present Age.--His children.--Renewed invitation.

LII. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 1 April, 1840.  Count D'Orsay, his
portrait of Carlyle.--Wages for books, due to Emerson.--Milnes's
review.--Heraud.--Landor.--Lectures in prospect on Heroes and
Hero-worship.

LIII. Emerson.  Concord, 21 April, 1840.  Introduction of Mr.
Grinnell.--Chartism.--Reprint of it.--At work on a book.--
Booksellers' accounts.--_The Dial._--Alcott.

LIV. Emerson.  Concord, 30 June, 1840.  _Wilhelm Meister_
received.--Landor.--Letter to Milnes.--Lithograph of Concord.
--_The Dial,_ No. 1.

LV. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 2 July, 1840.  Bibliopoliana.--Lectures
about Great Men.--Lecturing in America.--Milnes and his _Poems._
--Controversial volume from Ripley.

LVI. Emerson.  Concord, 30 August, 1840.  Booksellers' accounts.
--Faith cold concerning Carlyle's coming to America.--
Transcendentalism and _The Dial._--Social problems.--Character of
his writing.--Charles Sumner.

LVII. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 26 September, 1840.  Not to go to
America for the present.--_Heroes and Hero-Worship._--Journey on
horseback.--Reading on Cromwell.--_Dial_ No. 1.--Puseyism.--Dr.
Sewell on Carlyle.--Landor.--Sterling.

LVIII. Emerson.  Concord, 30 October, 1840.  Booksellers'
accounts.--Projects of social reform.--Studies unproductive.
--Hopes to print a book of essays.

LIX. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 9 December, 1840.  Booksellers'
carelessness and accounts.--Puseyism.--Dial No. 2.--Goethe.
--Miss Martineau's _Hour and Man._--Working in Cromwellism.

LX. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 21 February, 1841.  To Mrs. Emerson.--
London transmuted by her alchemy.--Hope of seeing Concord.
--Miss Martineau.--Toussaint l'Ouverture.--Sheets of _Heroes
and Hero-worship_ sent to Emerson.

LXI. Emerson.  Concord, 28 February, 1841.  Accounts.--Essays
soon to appear.--Lecture on Reform.

LXII. Emerson.  Boston, 30 April, 1841.  Remittance of L100.--
Accounts.--Piratical reprint of _Heroes and Hero-worship._--
_Dial_ No. 4.

LXIII. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 8 May, 1841.  Visit to Milnes.--To his
Mother.--Emerson's _Essays._--His own condition.

LXIV. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 21 May, 1841.  Acknowledgment of
remittance of L100.--Unauthorized American reprint of _Heroes and
Hero-worship._--Improvement in circumstances.--Desire for
solitude.--Article on Emerson in _Fraser's Magazine._

LXV. Emerson.  Concord, 30 May, 1841.  Accounts.--Book by Jones
Very.--_Heroes and Hero-worship._--Thoreau.

LXVI. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 25 June, 1841.  Proposed stay at Annan.
--Motives for it.--London reprint of Emerson's Essays.--Rio.

LXVII. Emerson.  Concord, 31 July, 1841.  London reprint of
_Essays._--Carlyle in his own land.--Writing an oration.

LXVIII. Carlyle.  Newby, Annan, Scotland, 18 August, 1841.
Speedy receipt of letter.--Stay in Scotland.--Seclusion and
sadness.--Reprint of Emerson's _Essays._--Shipwreck.

LXIX. Emerson.  Concord, 30 October, 1841.  Pleasure in English
reprint of _Essays._--Lectures on the Times.--Opportunities of
the Lecture-room.--Accounts.

LXX. Emerson.  Concord, 14 November, 1841.  Remittance of L40.--
His banker.--Gambardella.--Preparation for lectures on the Times.

LXXI. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 19 November, 1841.  Gambardella.--
Lawrence's portrait.--Emerson's Essays in England.--Address at
Waterville College.--_The Dial._--Emerson's criticism on Landor.

LXXII. Carlyle.  Chelsea, 6 December, 1841.  Acknowledgment of
remittance of L40.--American funds.--Landor.--Emerson's Lectures.

LXXIII. Emerson.  New York, 28 February, 1842.  Remittance of
L48.--American investments.--Death of his son.--Alcott going
to England.

LXXIV. Carlyle.  Templand, 28 March, 1842.  Sympathy, with
Emerson.--Death of Mrs. Carlyle's mother.--At Templand to settle
affairs.--Life there.--A book on Cromwell begun.

LXXV. Emerson.  Concord, 31 March, 1842.  Bereavement.--Alcott
going to England.--Editorship of _Dial._--Mr. Henry Lee.--
Lectures in New York.

---------------------



CORRESPONDENCE OF CARLYLE AND EMERSON

At the beginning of his "English Traits," Mr. Emerson, writing of
his visit to England in 1833, when he was thirty years old, says
that it was mainly the attraction of three or four writers, of
whom Carlyle was one, that had led him to Europe.  Carlyle's name
was not then generally known, and it illustrates Emerson's mental
attitude that he should have thus early recognized his genius,
and felt sympathy with it.

The decade from 1820 to 1830 was a period of unusual dulness in
English thought and imagination.  All the great literary
reputations belonged to the beginning of the century, Byron,
Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, had said their say.
The intellectual life of the new generation had not yet found
expression.  But toward the end of this time a series of
articles, mostly on German literature, appearing in the Edinburgh
and in the Foreign Quarterly Review, an essay on Burns, another
on Voltaire, still more a paper entitled "Characteristics,"
displayed the hand of a master, and a spirit in full sympathy
with the hitherto unexpressed tendencies and aspirations of its
time, and capable of giving them expression.  Here was a writer
whose convictions were based upon principles, and whose words
stood for realities.  His power was slowly acknowledged.  As yet
Carlyle had received hardly a token of recognition from his
contemporaries.

He was living solitary, poor, independent, in "desperate hope,"
at Craigenputtock.  On August 24,1833, he makes entry in his
Journal as follows:  "I am left here the solitariest, stranded,
most helpless creature that I have been for many years.....
Nobody asks me to work at articles.  The thing I want to write is
quite other than an article... In _all_ times there is a word
which spoken to men;  to the actual generation of men, would
thrill their inmost soul.  But the way to find that word?  The
way to speak it when found?"  The next entry in his Journal shows
that Carlyle had found the word.  It is the name "Ralph Waldo
Emerson," the record of Emerson's unexpected visit.  "I shall
never forget the visitor," wrote Mrs. Carlyle, long afterwards,
"who years ago, in the Desert, descended on us, out of the clouds
as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment for us,
and left me weeping that it was only one day."

At the time of this memorable visit Emerson was morally not less
solitary than Carlyle;  he was still less known;  his name had
been unheard by his host in the desert.  But his voice was soon
to become also the voice of a leader.  With temperaments sharply
contrasted, with traditions, inheritances, and circumstances
radically different, with views of life and of the universe
widely at variance, the souls of these two young men were yet in
sympathy, for their characters were based upon the same
foundation of principle.  In their independence and their
sincerity they were alike;  they were united in their faith in
spiritual truth, and their reverence for it.  Their modes of
thought of expression were not merely dissimilar, but divergent,
and yet, though parted by an ever widening cleft of difference,
they knew, as Carlyle said, that beneath it "the rock-strata,
miles deep, united again, and their two souls were at one"

Two days after Emerson's visit Carlyle wrote to his mother:--

"Three little happinesses have befallen us:  first, a piano-tuner,
procured for five shillings and sixpence, has been here,
entirely reforming the piano, so that I can hear a little music
now, which does me no little good.  Secondly, Major Irving, of
Gribton, who used at this season of the year to live and shoot at
Craigenvey, came in one day to us, and after some clatter offered
us a rent of five pounds for the right to shoot here, and even
tabled the cash that moment, and would not pocket it again.
Money easilier won never sat in my pocket;  money for delivering
us from a great nuisance, for now I will tell every gunner
applicant, 'I cannot, sir; it is let.'  Our third happiness was
the arrival of a certain young unknown friend, named Emerson,
from Boston, in the United States, who turned aside so far from
his British, French, and Italian travels to see me here!  He had
an introduction from Mill, and a Frenchman (Baron d'Eichthal's
nephew) whom John knew at Rome.  Of course we could do no other
than welcome him;  the rather as he seemed to be one of the most
lovable creatures in himself we had ever looked on.  He stayed
till next day with us, and talked and heard talk to his heart's
content, and left us all really sad to part with him.  Jane says
it is the first journey since Noah's Deluge undertaken to
Craigenputtock for such a purpose.  In any case, we had a
cheerful day from it, and ought to be thankful."

On the next Sunday, a week after his visit, Emerson wrote the
following account of it to his friend, Mr. Alexander Ireland.

"I found him one of the most simple and frank of men, and became
acquainted with him at once.  We walked over several miles of
hills, and talked upon all the great questions that interest us
most.  The comfort of meeting a man is that he speaks sincerely;
that he feels himself to be so rich, that he is above the
meanness of pretending to knowledge which he has not, and Carlyle
does not pretend to have solved the great problems, but rather to
be an observer of their solution as it goes forward in the world.
I asked him at what religious development the concluding passage
in his piece in the Edinburgh Review upon German literature
(say five years ago), and some passages in the piece called
'Characteristics,' pointed.  He replied that he was not competent
to state even to himself,--he waited rather to see.  My own
feeling was that I had met with men of far less power who had got
greater insight into religious truth.  He is, as you might guess
from his papers, the most catholic of philosophers;  he forgives
and loves everybody, and wishes each to struggle on in his own
place and arrive at his own ends.  But his respect for eminent
men, or rather his scale of eminence, is about the reverse of the
popular scale.  Scott, Mackintosh, Jeffrey, Gibbon,--even Bacon,
--are no heroes of his;  stranger yet, he hardly admires Socrates,
the glory of the Greek world;  but Burns, and Samuel Johnson, and
Mirabeau, he said interested him, and I suppose whoever else has
given himself with all his heart to a leading instinct, and has
not calculated too much.  But I cannot think of sketching even
his opinions, or repeating his conversations here.  I will
cheerfully do it when you visit me here in America.  He talks
finely, seems to love the broad Scotch, and I loved him very much
at once.  I am afraid he finds his entire solitude tedious, but I
could not help congratulating him upon his treasure in his wife,
and I hope he will not leave the moors;  't is so much better for
a man of letters to nurse himself in seclusion than to be filed
down to the common level by the compliances and imitations of
city society." *

-------------
* _Ralph Waldo Emerson. Recollections of his Visits to England_
By Alexander Ireland.  London, 1882, p. 58.
------------

Twenty-three years later, in his "English Traits," Emerson once
more describes his visit, and tells of his impressions of
Carlyle.

"From Edinburgh I went to the Highlands.  On my return I came
from Glasgow to Dumfries, and being intent on delivering a letter
which I had brought from Rome, inquired for Craigenputtock.  It
was a farm in Nithsdale, in the parish of Dunscore, sixteen miles
distant.  No public coach passed near it, so I took a private
carriage from the inn.  I found the house amid desolate heathery
hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart.
Carlyle was a man from his youth, an author who did not need to
hide from his readers, and as absolute a man of   the world,
unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on his own
terms what is best in London.  He was tall and gaunt, with a
cliff-like brow, self-possessed and holding his extraordinary
powers of conversation in easy command;  clinging to his northern
accent with evident relish;  full of lively anecdote, and with a
streaming humor which floated everything he looked upon.  His
talk, playfully exalting the most familiar objects, put the
companion at once into an acquaintance with his Lars and Lemurs,
and it was very pleasant to learn what was predestined to be a
pretty mythology.  Few were the objects and lonely the man, 'not
a person to speak to within sixteen miles, except the minister of
Dunscore';  so that books inevitably made his topics.

"He had names of his own for all the matters familiar to his
discourse.  Blackwood's was the 'sand magazine';  Fraser's nearer
approach to possibility of life was the 'mud magazine';  a piece
of road near by that marked some failed enterprise was 'the grave
of the last sixpence.'  When too much praise of any genius
annoyed him, he professed hugely to admire the talent shown by
his pig.  He had spent much time and contrivance in confining the
poor beast to one enclosure in his Pen;  but pig, by great
strokes of judgment, had found out how to let a board down, and
had foiled him.  For all that, he still thought man the most
plastic little fellow in the planet, and he liked Nero's death,
_Qualis artifex pereo!_ better than most history.  He worships a
man that will manifest any truth to him.  At one time he had
inquired and read a good deal about America.  Landor's principle
was mere rebellion, and _that,_ he feared, was the American
principle.  The best thing he knew of that country was, that in
it a man can have meat for his labor.  He had read in Stewart's
book, that when he inquired in a New York hotel for the Boots, he
had been shown across the street, and had found Mungo in his own
house dining on roast turkey.

"We talked of books.  Plato he does not read, and he disparaged
Socrates;  and, when pressed, persisted in making Mirabeau a
hero.  Gibbon he called the splendid bridge from the old world to
the new.  His own reading had been multifarious.  Tristram Shandy
was one of his first books after Robinson Crusoe and Robertson's
America, an early favorite.  Rousseau's Confessions had
discovered to him that he was not a dunce;  and it was now ten
years since he had learned German, by the advice of a man who
told him he would find in that language what he wanted.

"He took despairing or satirical views of literature at this
moment;  recounted the incredible sums paid in one year by the
great booksellers for puffing.  Hence it comes that no newspaper
is trusted now, no books are bought, and the booksellers are on
the eve of bankruptcy.

"He still returned to English pauperism, the crowded country, the
selfish abdication by public men of all that public persons
should perform.  'Government should direct poor men what to do.
Poor Irish folk come wandering over these moors;  my dame makes
it a rule to give to every son of Adam bread to eat, and supplies
his wants to the next house.  But here are thousands of acres
which might give them all meat, and nobody to bid these poor
Irish go to the moor and till it.  They burned the stacks, and so
found a way to force the rich people to attend to them.'

"We went out to walk over long hills, and looked at Criffel, then
without his cap, and down into Wordsworth's country.  There we
sat down and talked of the immortality of the soul.  It was not
Carlyle's fault that we talked on that topic, for he has the
natural disinclination of every nimble spirit to bruise itself
against walls, and did not like to place himself where no step
can be taken.  But he was honest and true, and cognizant of the
subtile links that bind ages together, and saw how every event
affects all the future.  'Christ died on the tree that built
Dunscore kirk yonder:  that brought you and me together.  Time
has only a relative existence.'

"He was already turning his eyes towards London with a scholar's
appreciation.  London is the heart of the world, he said,
wonderful only from the mass of human beings.  He liked the huge
machine.  Each keeps its own round.  The baker's boy brings
muffins to the window at a fixed hour every day, and that is all
the Londoner knows or wishes to know on the subject.  But it
turned out good men.  He named certain individuals, especially
one man of letters, his friend, the best mind he knew, whom
London had well served."

Such is the record of the beginnings of the friendship between
Carlyle and Emerson.  What place this friendship held in the
lives of both, the following Correspondence shows.

---------


I.  Emerson to Carlyle

Boston, Massachusetts, 14 May, 1884

My Dear Sir,--There are some purposes we delay long to execute
simply because we have them more at heart than others, and such
an one has been for many weeks, I may say months, my design of
writing you an epistle.

Some chance wind of Fame blew your name to me, perhaps two years
ago, as the author of papers which I had already distinguished
(as indeed it was very easy to do) from the mass of English
periodical criticism as by far the most original and profound
essays of the day,--the works of a man of Faith as well as
Intellect, sportive as well as learned, and who, belonging to the
despairing and deriding class of philosophers, was not ashamed to
hope and to speak sincerely.  Like somebody in _Wilhelm Meister_,
I said:  This person has come under obligations to me and to all
whom he has enlightened.  He knows not how deeply I should grieve
at his fall, if, in that exposed England where genius always
hears the Devil's whisper, "All these kingdoms will I give thee,"
his virtue also should be an initial growth put off with age.
When therefore I found myself in Europe, I went to your house
only to say, "Faint not,--the word you utter is heard, though in
the ends of the earth and by humblest men;  it works, prevails."
Drawn by strong regard to one of my teachers I went to see his
person, and as he might say his environment at Craigenputtock.
Yet it was to fulfil my duty, finish my mission, not with much
hope of gratifying him,--in the spirit of "If I love you, what is
that to you?"  Well, it happened to me that I was delighted with
my visit, justified to myself in my respect, and many a time upon
the sea in my homeward voyage I remembered with joy the favored
condition of my lonely philosopher, his happiest wedlock, his
fortunate temper, his steadfast simplicity, his all means of
happiness;--not that I had the remotest hope that he should so
far depart from his theories as to expect happiness.  On my
arrival at home I rehearsed to several attentive ears what I had
seen and heard, and they with joy received it.

In Liverpool I wrote to Mr. Fraser to send me Magazine, and I
have now received four numbers of the _Sartor Resartus,_ for
whose light thanks evermore.  I am glad that one living scholar
is self-centred, and will be true to himself though none ever
were before;  who, as Montaigne says, "puts his ear close by
himself, and holds his breath and listens."  And none can be
offended with the self-subsistency of one so catholic and jocund.
And 't is good to have a new eye inspect our mouldy social forms,
our politics, and schools, and religion.  I say _our,_ for it
cannot have escaped you that a lecture upon these topics written
for England may be read to America.  Evermore thanks for the
brave stand you have made for Spiritualism in these writings.
But has literature any parallel to the oddity of the vehicle
chosen to convey this treasure?  I delight in the contents;  the
form, which my defective apprehension for a joke makes me not
appreciate, I leave to your merry discretion.  And yet did ever
wise and philanthropic author use so defying a diction?  As if
society were not sufficiently shy of truth without providing it
beforehand with an objection to the form.  Can it be that this
humor proceeds from a despair of finding a contemporary audience,
and so the Prophet feels at liberty to utter his message in droll
sounds.  Did you not tell me, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, sitting upon
one of your broad hills, that it was Jesus Christ built Dunscore
Kirk yonder?  If you love such sequences, then admit, as you
will, that no poet is sent into the world before his time;  that
all the departed thinkers and actors have paved your way;  that
(at least when you surrender yourself) nations and ages do guide
your pen, yes, and common goose-quills as well as your diamond
graver.  Believe then that harp and ear are formed by one
revolution of the wheel;  that men are waiting to hear your
epical song;  and so be pleased to skip those excursive involved
glees, and give us the simple air, without the volley of
variations.  At least in some of your prefaces you should give us
the theory of your rhetoric.  I comprehend not why you should
lavish in that spendthrift style of yours celestial truths.
Bacon and Plato have something too solid to say than that they
can afford to be humorists.  You are dispensing that which is
rarest, namely, the simplest truths,--truths which lie next to
consciousness, and which only the Platos and Goethes perceive.  I
look for the hour with impatience when the vehicle will be worthy
of the spirit,--when the word will be as simple, and so as
resistless, as the thought,--and, in short, when your words
will be one with things.  I have no hope that you will find
suddenly a large audience.  Says not the sarcasm, "Truth hath
the plague in his house"?  Yet all men are _potentially_ (as
Mr. Coleridge would say) your audience, and if you will not
in very Mephistophelism repel and defy them, shall be actually;*
and whatever the great or the small may say about the charm of
diabolism, a true and majestic genius can afford to despise it.

------------
* This year, 1882, seventy thousand copies of a sixpenny edition
of _Sartor Resartus_ have been sold.
-------------

I venture to amuse you with this homiletic criticism because it
is the sense of uncritical truth seekers, to whom you are no more
than Hecuba, whose instincts assure them that there is Wisdom in
this grotesque Teutonic apocalyptic strain of yours, but that 't
is hence hindered in its effect.  And though with all my heart I
would stand well with my Poet, yet if I offend I shall quietly
retreat into my Universal relations, wherefrom I affectionately
espy you as a man, myself as another.

And yet before I come to the end of my letter I may repent of my
temerity and unsay my charge.  For are not all our circlets of
will as so many little eddies rounded in by the great Circle of
Necessity, and _could_ the Truth-speaker, perhaps now the best
Thinker of the Saxon race, have written otherwise?  And must
not we say that Drunkenness is a virtue rather than that Cato
has erred?

I wish I could gratify you with any pleasing news of the
regeneration, education, prospects, of man in this continent.
But your philanthropy is so patient, so far-sighted, that present
evils give you less solicitude.  In the last six years government
in the United States has been fast becoming a job, like great
charities.  A most unfit person in the Presidency has been doing
the worst things;  and the worse he grew, the more popular.  Now
things seem to mend.  Webster, a good man and as strong as if he
were a sinner, begins to find himself the centre of a great and
enlarging party and his eloquence incarnated and enacted by them;
yet men dare not hope that the majority shall be suddenly
unseated.  I send herewith a volume of Webster's that you may see
his speech on Foot's Resolutions, a speech which the Americans
have never done   praising.  I have great doubts whether the book
reaches you, as I know not my agents.  I shall put with it the
little book of my Swedenborgian druggist,* of whom I told you.
And if, which is hardly to be hoped, any good book should be
thrown out of our vortex of trade and politics, I shall not fail
to give it the same direction.

--------------
* _Observations on the Growth of the Mind,_ by Sampson Reed,
first published in 1825.  A fifth edition of this thoughtful
little treatise was published in 1865.  Mr. Reed was a graduate
of Harvard College in 1818;  he died in 1880, at the age
of eighty.
---------------

I need not tell you, my dear sir, what pleasure a letter from you
would give me when you have a few moments to spare to so remote a
friend.  If any word in my letter should provoke you to a reply,
I shall rejoice in my sauciness.  I am spending the summer in the
country, but my address is Boston, care of Barnard, Adams, & Co.
Care of O. Rich, London.  Please do make my affectionate respects
to Mrs. Carlyle, whose kindness I shall always gratefully
remember.  I depend upon her intercession to insure your writing
to me.  May God grant you both his best blessing.

Your friend,
        R. Waldo Emerson




II.  Carlyle to Emerson

5 Great Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London
12 August, 1834

My Dear Sir,--Some two weeks ago I received your kind gift from
Fraser.  To say that it was welcome would be saying little:  is
it not as a voice of affectionate remembrance, coming from beyond
the Ocean waters, first decisively announcing for me that a whole
New Continent _exists,_--that I too have part and lot there!
"Not till we can think that here and there one is thinking of us,
one is loving us, does this waste Earth become a peopled Garden."
Among the figures I can recollect as visiting our Nithsdale
hermitage,--all like _Apparitions_ now, bringing with them airs
from Heaven or else blasts from the other region,--there is
perhaps not one of a more undoubtedly supernal character than
yourself:  so pure and still, with intents so charitable;  and
then vanishing too so soon into the azure Inane, as an Apparition
should!  Never has your Address in my Notebook met my eye but
with a friendly influence.  Judge if I am glad to know that
there, in Infinite Space, you still hold by me.

I have read in both your books at leisure times, and now nearly
finished the smaller one.  He is a faithful thinker, that
Swedenborgian Druggist of yours, with really deep ideas, who
makes me too pause and think, were it only to consider what
manner of man he must be, and what manner of thing, after all,
Swedenborgianism must be.  "Through the smallest window look
well, and you can look out into the Infinite."  Webster also I
can recognize a sufficient, effectual man, whom one must wish
well to, and prophesy well of.  The sound of him is nowise
poetic-rhythmic;  it is clear, one-toned, you might say metallic,
yet distinct, significant, not without melody.  In his face,
above all, I discern that "indignation" which, if it do not make
"verses," makes _useful_ way in the world.  The higher such a man
rises, the better pleased I shall be.  And so here, looking
over the water, let me repeat once more what I believe is
already dimly the sentiment of all Englishmen, Cisoceanic and
Transoceanic, that we and you are not two countries, and cannot
for the life of us be;  but only two _parishes_ of one country,
with such wholesome parish hospitalities, and dirty temporary
parish feuds, as we see;  both of which brave parishes _Vivant!
vivant!_  And among the glories of _both_ be Yankee-doodle-doo,
and the Felling of the Western Forest, proudly remembered;  and
for the rest, by way of parish constable, let each cheerfully
take such George Washington or George Guelph as it can get, and
bless Heaven!  I am weary of hearing it said, "We love the
Americans,"  "We wish well," &c., &c.  What in God's name should
we do else?

You thank me for _Teufelsdrockh;_  how much more ought I to thank
you for your hearty, genuine, though extravagant acknowledgment
of it!  Blessed is the voice that amid dispiritment, stupidity,
and contradiction proclaims to us, _Euge!_  Nothing ever was more
ungenial than the soil this poor Teufelsdrockhish seed-corn has
been thrown on here;  none cries, Good speed to it;  the sorriest
nettle or hemlock seed, one would think, had been more welcome.
For indeed our British periodical critics, and especially
the public of _Fraser's_ Magazine (which I believe I have now
done with), exceed all speech;  require not even contempt,
only oblivion.  Poor Teufelsdrockh!--Creature of mischance,
miscalculation, and thousand-fold obstruction!  Here nevertheless
he is, as you see;  has struggled across the Stygian marshes, and
now, as a stitched pamphlet "for Friends," cannot be _burnt_ or
lost before his time.  I send you one copy for your own behoof;
three others you yourself can perhaps find fit readers for:  as
you spoke in the plural number, I thought there might be three;
more would rather surprise me.  From the British side of the
water I have met simply one intelligent response,--clear, true,
though almost enthusiastic as your own.  My British Friend too is
utterly a stranger, whose very name I know not, who did not
print, but only write, and to an unknown third party.*  Shall I
say then, "In the mouth of two witnesses"?  In any case, God be
thanked, I am done with it;  can wash my hands of it, and send it
forth;  sure that the Devil will get his full share of it,
and not a whit more, clutch as he may.  But as for you, my
Transoceanic brothers, read this earnestly, for it _was_
earnestly meant and written, and contains no _voluntary_
falsehood of mine.  For the rest, if you dislike it, say that I
wrote it four years ago, and could not now so write it, and on
the whole (as Fritz the Only said) "will do better another time."
With regard to style and so forth, what you call your "saucy"
objections are not only most intelligible to me, but welcome and
instructive.  You say well that I take up that attitude because I
have no known public, am alone under the heavens, speaking into
friendly or unfriendly space;  add only, that I will not defend
such attitude, that I call it questionable, tentative, and only
the best that I, in these mad times, could conveniently hit upon.
For you are to know, my view is that now at last we have lived to
see all manner of Poetics and Rhetorics and Sermonics, and one
may say generally all manner of _Pulpits_ for addressing mankind
from, as good as broken and abolished:  alas, yes! if you have
any earnest meaning which demands to be not only listened to, but
_believed_ and _done,_ you cannot (at least I cannot) utter it
_there,_ but the sound sticks in my throat, as when a solemnity
were _felt_ to have become a mummery;  and so one leaves the
pasteboard coulisses, and three unities, and Blair's Lectures,
quite behind;  and feels only that there is _nothing sacred,_
then, but the _Speech of Man_ to believing Men!  This, come what
will, was, is, and forever must be _sacred;_  and will one day,
doubtless, anew environ itself with fit modes;  with solemnities
that are _not_ mummeries.  Meanwhile, however, is it not
pitiable?  For though Teufelsdrockh exclaims, "Pulpit! canst thou
not make a pulpit by simply _inverting the nearest tub?_" yet,
alas! he does not sufficiently reflect that it is still only a
tub, that the most inspired utterance will come from _it,_
inconceivable, misconceivable, to the million;  questionable (not
of _ascertained_ significance) even to the few.  Pity us
therefore;  and with your just shake of the head join a
sympathetic, even a hopeful smile.  Since I saw you I have been
trying, am still trying, other methods, and shall surely get
nearer the truth, as I honestly strive for it.  Meanwhile, I know
no method of much consequence, except that of _believing,_ of
being _sincere:_  from Homer and the Bible down to the poorest
Burns's Song, I find no other Art that promises to be perennial.

---------
* In his Diary, July 26, 1834, Carlyle writes--"In the midst of
innumerable discouragements, all men indifferent or finding fault,
let me mention two small circumstances that are comfortable.
The first is a letter from some nameless Irishman in Cork
to another here, (Fraser read it to me without names,) actually
containing a _true_ and one of the friendliest possible recognitions
of me.  One mortal, then, says I am _not_ utterly wrong.
Blessings on him for it!  The second is a letter I got today
from Emerson, of Boston in America;  sincere, not baseless,
of most exaggerated estimation.  Precious is man to man."
Fifteen years later, in his _Reminiscences of My Irish
Journey,_ he enters, under date of July 16, 1849:  "Near eleven
o'clock [at night] announces himself 'Father O'Shea'! (who I
thought had been _dead_);  to my astonishment enter a little
gray-haired, intelligent-and-bred-looking man, with much
gesticulation, boundless loyal welcome, red with dinner and some
wine, engages that we are to meet tomorrow,--and again with
explosions of welcomes goes his way.  This Father O'Shea, some
fifteen years ago, had been, with Emerson of America, one of the
_two_ sons of Adam who encouraged poor bookseller Fraser, and
didn't discourage him, to go on with Teufelsdrockh.  I had often
remembered him since;  had not long before _re_-inquired his
name, but understood somehow that he was dead--and now."
---------------

But now quitting theoretics, let me explain what you long to
know, how it is that I date from London.  Yes, my friend, it is
even so:  Craigenputtock now stands solitary in the wilderness,
with none but an old woman and foolish grouse-destroyers in it;
and we for the last ten weeks, after a fierce universal
disruption, are here with our household gods.  Censure not;  I
came to London for the best of all reasons,--to seek bread and
work.  So it literally stands;  and so do I literally stand with
the hugest, gloomiest Future before me, which in all sane moments
I good-humoredly defy.  A strange element this, and I as good as
an Alien in it.  I care not for Radicalism, for Toryism, for
Church, Tithes, or the "Confusion" of useful Knowledge.  Much
as I can speak and hear, I am alone, alone.  My brave Father,
now victorious from his toil, was wont to pray in evening
worship:  "Might we say, We are not alone, for God is with us!"
Amen! Amen!

I brought a manuscript with me of another curious sort, entitled
_The Diamond Necklace._  Perhaps it will be printed soon as an
Article, or even as a separate Booklet,--a _queer_ production,
which you shall see.  Finally, I am busy, constantly studying
with my whole might for a Book on the French Revolution.  It is
part of my creed that the Only Poetry is History, could we tell
it right.  This truth (if it prove one) I have not yet got to the
limitations of;  and shall in no way except by _trying_ it in
practice.  The story of the Necklace was the first attempt at
an experiment.

My sheet is nearly done;  and I have still to complain of you for
telling me nothing of yourself except that you are in the
country.  Believe that I want to know much and all.  My wife too
remembers you with unmixed friendliness;  bids me send you her
kindest wishes.  Understand too that your old bed stands in a new
room here, and the old welcome at the door.  Surely we shall see
you in London one day.  Or who knows but Mahomet may go to the
mountain?  It occasionally rises like a mad prophetic dream in
me, that I might end in the Western Woods!

From Germany I get letters, messages, and even visits;  but now
no tidings, no influences, of moment.  Goethe's Posthumous Works
are all published;  and Radicalism (poor hungry, yet inevitable
Radicalism!) is the order of the day.  The like, and even more,
from France.  Gustave d'Eichthal (did you hear?) has gone over to
Greece, and become some kind of Manager under King Otho.*

-----------
* Gustave d'Eichthal, whose acquaintance Emerson had made at
Rome, and who had given him an introduction to Carlyle, was one
of a family of rich Jewish bankers at Paris.  He was an ardent
follower of Saint-Simon, and an associate of Enfantin.  After the
dispersion of the Saint-Simonians in 1832, he traveled much, and
continued to devote himself to the improvement of society.
----------

Continue to love me, you and my other friends;  and as packets
sail so swiftly, let me know it frequently.  All good be
with you!

Most faithfully,
             T. Carlyle

Coleridge, as you doubtless hear, is gone.  How great a Possibility,
how small a realized Result!  They are delivering Orations about
him, and emitting other kinds of froth, _ut mos est._  What hurt
can it do?




III.  Emerson to Carlyle *

Concord, Mass., 20 November, 1834

My Dear Sir,--Your letter, which I received last week, made a
bright light in a solitary and saddened place.  I had quite
recently received the news of the death of a brother** in the
island of Porto Rico, whose loss to me will be a lifelong sorrow.
As he passes out of sight, come to me visible as well as
spiritual tokens of a fraternal friendliness which, by its own
law, transcends the tedious barriers of custom and nation;  and
opens its way to the heart.  This is a true consolation, and I
thanked my jealous [Greek] for the godsend so significantly
timed.  It, for the moment, realizes the hope to which I have
clung with both hands, through each disappointment, that I might
converse with a man whose ear of faith was not stopped, and whose
argument I could not predict.  May I use the word, "I thank my
God whenever I call you to remembrance."

----------
* This letter was printed in the _Athenaeum,_ London, June 24,
1882.  It, as well as three others which appeared in the same
journal, is now reprinted, through the courtesy of its editor,
from the original.

** Edward Bliss Emerson, his next younger brother, "brother of
the brief but blazing star," of whom Emerson wrote _In Memoriam:_--

     "There is no record left on earth,
     Save in tablets of the heart,
     Of the rich, inherent worth,
     Of the grace that on him shone,
     Of eloquent lips, of joyful wit;
     He could not frame a word unfit,
     An act unworthy to be done.

     On his young promise Beauty smiled,
     Drew his free homage unbeguiled,
     And prosperous Age held out his hand,
     And richly his large future planned,
     And troops of friends enjoyed the tide,--
     All, all was given, and only health denied."
----------

I receive with great pleasure the wonderful Professor now that
first the decent limbs of Osiris are collected.*  We greet him
well to Cape Cod and Boston Bay.  The rigid laws of matter
prohibit that the soul imprisoned within the strait edges of
these types should add one syllable thereto, or we had adjured
the Sage by every name of veneration to take possession by so
much as a Salve! of his Western World, but he remained inexorable
for any new communications.

-------------
* The four copies of _Sartor_ which Carlyle had sent were a
"stitched pamphlet," with a title-page bearing the words: "Sartor
Resartus: in Three Books.  Reprinted for Friends, from Fraser's
Magazine. London, 1834."
-------------

I feel like congratulating you upon the cold welcome which you
say Teufelsdrockh* has met.  As it is not earthly happy, it is
marked of a high sacred sort.  I like it a great deal better than
ever, and before it was all published I had eaten nearly all my
words of objection.  But do not think it shall lack a present
popularity.  That it should not be known seems possible, for if a
memoir of Laplace had been thrown into that muck-heap of Fraser's
Magazine, who would be the wiser?  But this has too much wit and
imagination not to strike a class who would not care for it as a
faithful mirror of this very Hour.  But you know the proverb, "To
be fortunate, be not too wise."  The great men of the day are on
a plane so low as to be thoroughly intelligible to the vulgar.
Nevertheless, as God maketh the world forevermore, whatever the
devils may seem to do, so the thoughts of the best minds always
become the last opinion of Society.  Truth is ever born in a
manger, but is compensated by living till it has all souls for
its kingdom.  Far, far better seems to me the unpopularity of
this Philosophical Poem (shall I call it?) than the adulation
that followed your eminent friend Goethe.  With him I am becoming
better acquainted, but mine must be a qualified admiration.  It
is a singular piece of good-nature in you to apotheosize him.  I
cannot but regard it as his misfortune, with conspicuous bad
influence on his genius, that velvet life he led.  What
incongruity for genius, whose fit ornaments and reliefs are
poverty and hatred, to repose fifty years on chairs of state and
what pity that his Duke did not cut off his head to save him from
the mean end (forgive) of retiring from the municipal incense "to
arrange tastefully his gifts and medals"!  Then the Puritan in me
accepts no apology for bad morals in such as he.  We can tolerate
vice in a splendid nature whilst that nature is battling with the
brute majority in defence of some human principle.  The sympathy
his manhood and his misfortunes call out adopts even his faults;
but genius pampered, acknowledged, crowned, can only retain our
sympathy by turning the same force once expended against outward
enemies now against inward, and carrying forward and planting the
standard of Oromasdes so many leagues farther on into the envious
Dark.  Failing this, it loses its nature and becomes talent,
according to the definition,--mere skill in attaining vulgar
ends.  A certain wonderful friend of mine said that "a false
priest is the falsest of false things."  But what makes the
priest?  A cassock?  O Diogenes!  Or the power (and thence the
call) to teach man's duties as they flow from the Superhuman?  Is
not he who perceives and proclaims the Superhumanities, he who
has once intelligently pronounced the words "Self-Renouncement,"
"Invisible Leader," "Heavenly Powers of Sorrow," and so on,
forever the liege of the same?

------------
* Emerson uniformly spells this name "Teufelsdroch."
------------

Then to write luxuriously is not the same thing as to live so,
but a new and worse offence.  It implies an intellectual defect
also, the not perceiving that the present corrupt condition of
human nature (which condition this harlot muse helps to
perpetuate) is a temporary or superficial state.  The good word
lasts forever:  the impure word can only buoy itself in the gross
gas that now envelops us, and will sink altogether to ground as
that works itself clear in the everlasting effort of God.

May I not call it temporary? for when I ascend into the pure
region of truth (or under my undermost garment, as Epictetus and
Teufelsdrockh would say), I see that to abide inviolate, although
all men fall away from it;  yea, though the whole generation of
Adam should be healed as a sore off the face of the creation.
So, my friend, live Socrates and Milton, those starch Puritans,
for evermore!  Strange is it to me that you should not sympathize
(yet so you said) with Socrates, so ironical, so true, and who
"tramped in the mire with wooden shoes whenever they would force
him into the clouds."  I seem to see him offering the hand to you
across the ages which some time you will grasp.

I am glad you like Sampson Reed, and that he has inspired some
curiosity respecting his Church.  Swedenborgianism, if you should
be fortunate in your first meetings, has many points of
attraction for you:  for instance, this article, "The poetry of
the Old Church is the reality of the New," which is to be
literally understood, for they esteem, in common with all the
Trismegisti, the Natural World as strictly the symbol or exponent
of the Spiritual, and part for part;  the animals to be the
incarnations of certain affections;  and scarce a popular
expression esteemed figurative, but they affirm to be the
simplest statement of fact.  Then is their whole theory of social
relations--both in and out of the body--most philosophical, and,
though at variance with the popular theology, self-evident.  It
is only when they come to their descriptive theism, if I may say
so, and then to their drollest heaven, and to some autocratic not
moral decrees of God, that the mythus loses me.  In general, too,
they receive the fable instead of the moral of their Aesop.  They
are to me, however, deeply interesting, as a sect which I think
must contribute more than all other sects to the new faith which
must arise out of all.

You express a desire to know something of myself.  Account me "a
drop in the ocean seeking another drop," or God-ward, striving to
keep so true a sphericity as to receive the due ray from every
point of the concave heaven.  Since my return home, I have been
left very much at leisure.  It were long to tell all my
speculations on my profession and my doings thereon;  but,
possessing my liberty, I am determined to keep it, at the risk of
uselessness (which risk God can very well abide), until such
duties offer themselves as I can with integrity discharge.  One
thing I believe,--that Utterance is place enough:  and should I
attain through any inward revelation to a more clear perception
of my assigned task, I shall embrace it with joy and praise.  I
shall not esteem it a low place, for instance, if I could
strengthen your hands by true expressions of the hope and
pleasure which your writings communicate to me and to some of my
countrymen.  Yet the best poem of the Poet is his own mind, and
more even than in any of the works I rejoice in the promise of
the workman.  Now I am only reading and musing, and when I have
any news to tell of myself, you shall hear them.

Now as to the welcome hint that you might come to America, it
shall be to me a joyful hope.  Come and found a new Academy that
shall be church and school and Parnassus, as a true Poet's house
should be.  I dare not say that wit has better chance here than
in England of winning world-wages, but it can always live, and it
can scarce find competition.  Indeed, indeed, you shall have the
continent to yourself were it only as Crusoe was king.  If you
cared to read literary lectures, our people have vast curiosity,
and the apparatus is very easy to set agoing.  Such 'pulpit' as
you pleased to erect would at least find no hindrance in the
building.  A friend of mine and of yours remarked, when I
expressed the wish that you would come here, "that people were
not here, as in England, sacramented to organized schools of
opinion, but were a far more convertible audience."  If at all
you can think of coming here, I would send you any and all
particulars of information with cheerfulest speed.

I have written a very long letter, yet have said nothing of much
that I would say upon chapters of the _Sartor._  I must keep
that, and the thoughts I had upon 'poetry in history',' for
another letter, or (might it be!) for a dialogue face to face.

Let me not fail of _The Diamond Necklace._  I found three greedy
receivers of Teufelsdrockh, who also radiate its light.  For the
sake of your knowing what manner of men you move, I send you two
pieces writ by one of them, Frederic Henry Hedge, the article on
Swedenborg and that on Phrenology.  And as you like Sampson Reed,
here are one or two more of his papers.  Do read them.  And since
you study French history do not fail to look at our Yankee
portrait of Lafayette.  Present my best remembrances to Mrs.
Carlyle, whom that stern and blessed solitude has armed and
sublimed out of all reach of the littleness and unreason of
London.  If I thought we could win her to the American shore, I
would send her the story of those godly women, the contemporaries
of John Knox's daughter, who came out hither to enjoy the worship
of God amidst wild men and wild beasts.

Your friend and servant,
                    R. Waldo Emerson




IV. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London
3 February, 1835

My Dear Sir,--I owe you a speedy answer as well as a grateful
one;  for, in spite of the swift ships of the Americans, our
communings pass too slowly.  Your letter, written in November,
did not reach me till a few days ago;  your Books or Papers have
not yet come,--though the ever-punctual Rich, I can hope, will
now soon get them for me.  He showed me his _way-bill_ or
invoice, and the consignment of these friendly effects "to
another gentleman," and undertook with an air of great fidelity
to bring all to a right bearing.  On the whole, as the Atlantic
is so broad and deep, ought we not rather to esteem it a
beneficent miracle that messages can arrive at all;  that a
little slip of paper will skim over all these weltering floods,
and other inextricable confusions, and come at last, in the hand
of the Twopenny Postman, safe to your lurking-place, like green
leaf in the bill of Noah's Dove?  Let us be grateful for mercies;
let us use them while they are granted us.  Time was when "they
that feared the Lord spake _often_ one to another."  A friendly
thought is the purest gift that man can afford to man.  "Speech"
also, they say, "is cheerfuler than light itself."

The date of your letter gives me unhappily no idea but that of
Space and Time.  As you know my whereabout, will you throw a
little light on your own?  I can imagine Boston, and have often
seen the musket volleys on Bunker Hill;  but in this new spot
there is nothing for me save sky and earth, the chance of
retirement, peace, and winter seclusion.  Alas!  I can too well
fancy one other thing:  the bereavement you allude to, the sorrow
that will so long be painful before it can become merely sad and
sacred.  Brothers, especially in these days, are much to us:  had
one no brother, one could hardly understand what it was to have a
Friend;  they are the Friends whom Nature chose for us;  Society
and Fortune, as things now go, are scarcely compatible with
Friendship, and contrive to get along, miserably enough, without
it.  Yet sorrow not above measure for him that is gone.  He is,
in very deed and truth, with God,--_where_ you and I both are.
What a thin film it is that divides the Living from the Dead!  In
still nights, as Jean Paul says, "the limbs of my Buried Ones
touched cold on my soul, and drove away its blots, as dead hands
heal eruptions of the skin."  Let us turn back into Life.

That you sit there bethinking yourself, and have yet taken no
course of activity, and can without inward or outward hurt so
sit, is on the whole rather pleasing news to me.  It is a great
truth which you say, that Providence can well afford to have one
sit:  another great truth which you feel without saying it is
that a course wherein clear faith cannot go with you may be worse
than none;  if clear faith go never so slightly against it, then
it is certainly worse than none.  To speak with perhaps ill-bred
candor, I like as well to fancy you _not_ preaching to Unitarians
a Gospel after their heart.  I will say farther, that you are the
only man I ever met with of that persuasion whom I could
unobstructedly like.  The others that I have seen were all a kind
of halfway-house characters, who, I thought, should, if they had
not wanted courage, have ended in unbelief;  in "faint possible
Theism," which I like considerably worse than Atheism.  Such, I
could not but feel, deserve the fate they find here;  the bat
fate:  to be killed among the rats as a bird, among the birds as
a rat.... Nay, who knows but it is doubts of the like kind in
your own mind that keep you for a time inactive even now?  For
the rest, that you have liberty to choose by your own will
merely, is a great blessing:  too rare for those that could use
it so well;  nay, often it is difficult to use.  But till _ill
health_ of body or of mind warns you that the moving, not the
sitting, position is essential, _sit_ still, contented in
conscience;  understanding well that no man, that God only knows
_what_ we are working, and will show it one day;  that such and
such a one, who filled the whole Earth with his hammering and
troweling, and would not let men pass for his rubbish, turns out
to have built of mere coagulated froth, and vanishes with his
edifice, traceless, silently, or amid hootings illimitable;
while again that other still man, by the word of his mouth, by
the very look of his face, was scattering influences, as _seeds_
are scattered, "to be found flourishing as a banyan grove after a
thousand years."  I beg your pardon for all this preaching, if it
be superfluous impute it to no miserable motive.

Your objections to Goethe are very natural, and even bring you
nearer me:  nevertheless, I am by no means sure that it were not
your wisdom, at this moment, to set about learning the German
Language, with a view towards studying _him_ mainly!  I do not
assert this;  but the truth of it would not surprise me.  Believe
me, it is impossible you can be more a Puritan than I;  nay, I
often feel as if I were far too much so:  but John Knox himself,
could he have seen the peaceable impregnable _fidelity_ of that
man's mind, and how to him also Duty was _infinite,_--Knox would
have passed on, wondering not reproaching.  But I will tell you
in a word why I like Goethe:  his is the only _healthy_ mind,
of any extent, that I have discovered in Europe for long
generations;  it was he that first convincingly proclaimed to me
(convincingly, for I saw it _done_):  Behold, even in this
scandalous Sceptico-Epicurean generation, when all is gone but
hunger and cant, it is still possible that Man be a Man!  For
which last Evangel, the confirmation and rehabilitation of all
other Evangels whatsoever, how can I be too grateful?  On the
whole, I suspect you yet know only Goethe the Heathen (Ethnic);
but you will know Goethe the Christian by and by, and like that
one far better.  Rich showed me a Compilation* in green cloth
boards that you had beckoned across the water:  pray read the
fourth volume of that, and let a man of your clearness of feeling
say whether that was a Parasite or a Prophet.--And then as to
"misery" and the other dark ground on which you love to see
genius paint itself,--alas! consider whether misery is not _ill
health_ too;  also whether good fortune is not worse to bear than
bad;  and on the whole whether the glorious serene summer is not
greater than the wildest hurricane,--as Light, the Naturalists
say, is stronger a thousand times than Lightning.  And so I
appeal to Philip sober;--and indeed have hardly said as much
about Goethe since I saw you, for nothing reigns here but
twilight delusion (falser for the time than midnight darkness) on
that subject, and I feel that the most suffer nothing thereby,
having properly nothing or little to do with such a matter but
with you, who are not "seeking recipes for happiness," but
something far higher, it is not so, and _therefore_ I have spoken
and appealed;  and hope the new curiosity, if I have awakened
any, will do you no mischief.

------------
* Obviously Carlyle's _Specimens of German Romance,_ of which the
fourth volume was devoted to Goethe.
------------

But now as to myself;  for you will grumble at a sheet of
speculation sent so far:  I am here still, as Rob Roy was on
Glasgow Bridge, _biding tryste;_  busy extremely, with work that
will not profit me at all in some senses;  suffering rather in
health and nerves;  and still with nothing like dawn on any
quarter of my horizon.  _The Diamond Necklace_ has not been
printed, but will be, were this _French Revolution_ out;  which
latter, however, drags itself along in a way that would fill your
benevolent heart with pity.  I am for three small volumes now,
and have one done.  It is the dreadfulest labor (with these
nerves, this liver) I ever undertook;  all is so inaccurate,
superficial, vague, in the numberless books I consult;  and
without accuracy at least, what other good is possible?  Add to
this that I have no hope about the thing, except only that I
_shall be done with it:_  I can reasonably expect nothing from
any considerable class here, but at _best_ to be scolded and
reproached;  perhaps to be left standing "on my own basis,"
without note or comment of any kind, save from the Bookseller,
who will lose his printing.  The hope I have however is sure:  if
life is lent me, I shall be _done with_ the business;  I will
write this "History of Sansculottism," the notablest phenomenon I
meet with since the time of the Crusades or earlier;  after which
my part is played.  As for the future, I heed it little when so
busy;  but it often seems to me as if one thing were becoming
indisputable:  that I must seek another craft than literature for
these years that may remain to me. Surely, I often say, if ever
man had a finger-of-Providence shown him, thou hast it;  literature
will neither yield thee bread, nor a stomach to digest bread with:
quit it in God's name, shouldst thou take spade and mattock instead.
The truth is, I believe literature to be as good as dead and gone
in all parts of Europe at this moment, and nothing but hungry
Revolt and Radicalism appointed us for perhaps three generations;
I do not see how a man can honestly live by writing in another
dialect than that, in England at least;  so that if you determine
on not living dishonestly, it will behove you to look several
things full in the face, and ascertain what is what with some
distinctness.  I suffer also terribly from the solitary existence
I have all along had;  it is becoming a kind of passion with me,
to feel myself among my brothers.  And then, How?  Alas!  I
care not a doit for Radicalism, nay I feel it to be a wretched
necessity, unfit for me;  Conservatism being not unfit only
but false for me:  yet these two are the grand Categories
under which all English spiritual activity that so much as
thinks remuneration possible must range itself.  I look
around accordingly on a most wonderful vortex of things;  and
pray to God only, that as my day, is so my strength may be.
What will come out of it is wholly uncertain:  for I have
possibilities too;  the possibilities of London are far from
exhausted yet:  I have a brave brother, who invites me to
come and be quiet with him in Rome;  a brave friend (known to
you) who opens the door of a new Western world,--and so we will
stand considering and consulting, at least till the Book be over.
Are all these things interesting to you?  I know they are.

As for America and Lecturing, it is a thing I do sometimes turn
over, but never yet with any seriousness.  What your friend says
of the people being more persuadable, so far, as having no
Tithe-controversy, &c., &c. will go, I can most readily understand
it.  But apart from that, I should rather fancy America mainly a
new Commercial England, with a fuller pantry,--little more or little
less.  The same unquenchable, almost frightfully unresting spirit
of endeavor, directed (woe is me!) to the making of money, or
money's worth;  namely, food finer and finer, and gigmanic
renown higher and higher:  nay, must not your gigmanity be a
_purse_-gigmanity, some half-shade worse than a purse-and-pedigree
one?  Or perhaps it is not a whit worse;  only rougher, more
substantial;  on the whole better?  At all events ours is fast
becoming identical with it;  for the pedigree ingredient is as
near as may be gone:  _Gagnez de l'argent, et ne vous faites pas
pendre,_ this is very nearly the whole Law, first Table and
second.  So that you see, when I set foot on American land, it
will be on no Utopia;  but on a _conditional_ piece of ground
where some things are to be expected and other things not.  I may
say, on the other hand, that Lecturing (or I would rather it were
_speaking_) is a thing I have always had some hankering after:
it seems to me I could really _swim_ in that element, were I once
thrown into it;  that in fact it would develop several things in
me which struggle violently for development.  The great want I
have towards such an enterprise is one you may guess at:  want of
a _rubric,_ of a title to name my speech by.  Could any one but
appoint me Lecturing Professor of Teufelsdrockh's science,--
"Things in general"!  To discourse of Poets and Poetry in the
Hazlitt style, or talk stuff about the Spirit of the Age, were
most unedifying:  one knows not what to call himself.  However,
there is no doubt that were the child born it _might_ be
christened;  wherefore I will really request you to take the
business into your consideration, and give me in the most
rigorous sober manner you can some scheme of it.  How many
Discourses;  what Towns;  the probable Expenses, the probable net
Income, the Time, &c., &c.:  all that you can suppose a man
wholly ignorant might want to know about it.  America I should
like well enough to visit, much as I should another part of my
native country:  it is, as you see, distinctly possible that such
a thing might be;  we will keep it hanging, to solace ourselves
with it, till the time decide.

Have I involved you in double postage by this loquacity? or What
is your American rule?  I did not intend it when I began;  but
today my confusion of head is very great and words must be
multiplied with only a given quantity of meaning.

My wife, who is just gone out to spend the day with a certain
"celebrated Mrs. Austin," (called also the "celebrated Translatress
of Puckler-Muskau,") charged me very specially to send you
her love, her good wishes and thanks:  I assure you there
is no hypocrisy in that.  She votes often for taking the
Transatlantic scheme into contemplation;  declares farther that
my Book and Books must and will indisputably prosper (at some
future era), and takes the world beside me--as a good wife and
daughter of John Knox should.  Speaking of "celebrated" persons
here, let me mention that I have learned by stern experience, as
children do with fire, to keep in general quite out of the way of
celebrated persons, more especially celebrated women.  This Mrs.
Austin, who is half ruined by celebrity (of a kind), is the only
woman I have seen not wholly ruined by it.  Men, strong men, I
have seen die of it, or go mad by it.  _Good_ fortune is far
worse than bad!

Will you write with all despatch, my dear sir;  fancy me a
fellow-wayfarer, who cordially bids you God-speed, and would
fain keep in sight of you, within sound of you.

Yours with great sincerity,
                     T. Carlyle




V.  Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 12 March, 1838

My Dear Sir,--I am glad of the opportunity of Mr. Barnard's*
visit to say health and peace be with you.  I esteem it the best
sign that has shone in my little section of space for many days,
that some thirty or more intelligent persons understand and
highly appreciate the _Sartor._  Dr. Channing sent to me for it
the other day, and I have since heard that he had read it with
great interest.  As soon as I go into town I shall see him and
measure his love.  I know his genius does not and cannot engage
your attention much.  He possesses the mysterious endowment of
natural eloquence, whose effect, however intense, is limited, of
course, to personal communication.  I can see myself that his
writings, without his voice, may be meagre and feeble.  But
please love his catholicism, that at his age can relish the
_Sartor,_ born and inveterated as he is in old books.  Moreover,
he lay awake all night, he told my friend last week, because he
had learned in the evening that some young men proposed to issue
a journal, to be called _The Transcendentalist,_ as the organ of
a spiritual philosophy.  So much for our gossip of today.

---------
* Mr. Henry Barnard, of Hartford, Connecticut, to whom Emerson
had given a note of introduction to Carlyle.
---------

But my errand is yet to tell.  Some friends here are very
desirous that Mr. Fraser should send out to a bookseller here
fifty or a hundred copies of the _Sartor._  So many we want very
much;  they would be sold at once.  If we knew that two or three
hundred would be taken up, we should reprint it now.  But we
think it better to satisfy the known inquirers for the book
first, and when they have extended the demand for it, then to
reproduce it, a naturalized Yankee.  The lovers of Teufelsdrockh
here are sufficiently enthusiastic.  I am an icicle to them.
They think England must be blind and deaf if the Professor makes
no more impression there than yet appears.  I, with the most
affectionate wishes for Thomas Carlyle's fame, am mainly bent on
securing the medicinal virtues of his book for my young
neighbors.  The good people think he overpraises Goethe.  There I
give him up to their wrath.  But I bid them mark his unsleeping
moral sentiment;  that every other moralist occasionally nods,
becomes complaisant and traditional;  but this man is without
interval on the side of equity and humanity!  I am grieved for
you, O wise friend, that you cannot put in your own contemptuous
disclaimer of such puritanical pleas as are set up for you;  but
each creature and Levite must do after his kind.

Yet do not imagine that I will hurt you in this unseen domain of
yours by any Boswellism.  Every suffrage you get here is fairly
your own.  Nobody is coaxed to admire you, and you have won
friends whom I should be proud to show you, and honorable women
not a few.  And cannot you renew and confirm your suggestion
touching your appearance in this continent?  Ah, if I could give
your intimation the binding force of an oracular word!--in a few
months, please God, at most, I shall have wife, house, and home
wherewith and wherein to return your former hospitality.  And if
I could draw my prophet and his prophetess to brighten and
immortalize my lodge, and make it the window through which for a
summer you should look out on a field which Columbus and Berkeley
and Lafayette did not scorn to sow, my sun should shine clearer
and life would promise something better than peace.  There is a
part of ethics, or in Schleiermacher's distribution it might be
physics, which possesses all attraction for me;  to wit, the
compensations of the Universe, the equality and the coexistence
of action and reaction, that all prayers are granted, that every
debt is paid.  And the skill with which the great All maketh
clean work as it goes along, leaves no rag, consumes its smoke,--
will I hope make a chapter in your thesis.

I intimated above that we aspire to have a work on the First
Philosophy in Boston.  I hope, or wish rather.  Those that are
forward in it debate upon the name.  I doubt not in the least its
reception if the material that should fill it existed.  Through
the thickest understanding will the reason throw itself instantly
into relation with the truth that is its object, whenever that
appears.  But how seldom is the pure loadstone produced!  Faith
and love are apt to be spasmodic in the best minds:  Men live on
the brink of mysteries and harmonies into which yet they never
enter, and with their hand on the door-latch they die outside.
Always excepting my wonderful Professor, who among the living has
thrown any memorable truths into circulation?  So live and
rejoice and work, my friend, and God you aid, for the profit of
many more than your mortal eyes shall see.  Especially seek with
recruited and never-tired vision to bring back yet higher and
truer report from your Mount of Communion of the Spirit that
dwells there and creates all.  Have you received a letter from me
with a pamphlet sent in December?  Fail not, I beg of you, to
remember me to Mrs. Carlyle.

Can you not have some _Sartors_ sent?  Hilliard, Gray, & Co. are
the best publishers in Boston.  Or Mr. Rich has connections with
Burdett in Boston.

Yours with respect and affection,
                              R. Waldo Emerson




VI.   Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 30 April, 1835

My Dear Sir,--I received your letter of the 3d of February on the
20th instant, and am sorry that hitherto we have not been able to
command a more mercantile promptitude in the transmission of
these light sheets.  If desire of a letter before it arrived, or
gladness when it came, could speed its journey, I should have it
the day it was written.  But, being come, it makes me sad and
glad by turns.  I admire at the alleged state of your English
reading public without comprehending it, and with a hoping
scepticism touching the facts.  I hear my Prophet deplore, as his
predecessors did, the deaf ear and the gross heart of his people,
and threaten to shut his lips;  but, happily, this he cannot do,
any more than could they.  The word of the Lord _will_ be spoken.
But I shall not much grieve that the English people and you are
not of the same mind if that apathy or antipathy can by any means
be the occasion of your visiting America.  The hope of this is so
pleasant to me, that I have thought of little else for the week
past, and having conferred with some friends on the matter, I
shall try, in obedience to your request, to give you a statement
of our capabilities, without indulging my penchant for the
favorable side.  Your picture of America is faithful enough:  yet
Boston contains some genuine taste for literature, and a good
deal of traditional reverence for it.  For a few years past, we
have had, every winter, several courses of lectures, scientific,
political, miscellaneous, and even some purely literary, which
were well attended.  Some lectures on Shakespeare were crowded;
and even I found much indulgence in reading, last winter, some
Biographical Lectures, which were meant for theories or portraits
of Luther, Michelangelo, Milton, George Fox, Burke.  These
courses are really given under the auspices of Societies, as
"Natural History Society," "Mechanics' Institutes," "Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge," &c., &c., and the fee to the lecturer is
inconsiderable, usually $20 for each lecture.  But in a few
instances individuals have undertaken courses of lectures, and
have been well paid.  Dr. Spurzheim* received probably $3,000 in
the few months that he lived here.  Mr. Silliman, a Professor of
Yale College, has lately received something more than that for a
course of fifteen or sixteen lectures on Geology.  Private
projects of this sort are, however, always attended with a degree
of uncertainty.  The favor of my townsmen is often sudden and
spasmodic, and Mr. Silliman, who has had more success than ever
any before him, might not find a handful of hearers another
winter.  But it is the opinion of many friends whose judgment I
value, that a person of so many claims upon the ear and
imagination of our fashionable populace as the "author of the
_Life of Schiller,_" "the reviewer of _Burns's Life,_" the live
"contributor to the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign_ Reviews," nay, the
"worshipful Teufelsdrockh," the "personal friend of Goethe,"
would, for at least one season, batter down opposition, and
command all ears on whatever topic pleased him, and that, quite
independently of the merit of his lectures, merely for so many
names' sake.

-----------
* The memory of Dr. Spurzheim has faded, but his name is still
known to men of science on both sides of the Atlantic as that of
the most ardent and accomplished advocate of the doctrine of
Phrenology. He came to the United States in 1832 to advance the
cause he had at heart, but he had been only a short time in the
country when he died at Boston of a fever.
-------------

But the subject, you say, does not yet define itself.  Whilst it
is "gathering to a god," we who wait will only say, that we know
enough here of Goethe and Schiller to have some interest in
German literature.  A respectable German here, Dr. Follen, has
given lectures to a good class upon Schiller.  I am quite sure
that Goethe's name would now stimulate the curiosity of scores of
persons.  On English literature, a much larger class would have
some preparedness.  But whatever topics you might choose, I need
not say you must leave under them scope for your narrative and
pictorial powers;  yes, and space to let out all the length of
all the reins of your eloquence of moral sentiment.  What "Lay
Sermons" might you not preach! or methinks "Lectures on Europe"
were a sea big enough for you to swim in.  The only condition our
adolescent ear insists upon is, that the English as it is spoken
by the unlearned shall be the bridge between our teacher and
our tympanum.

_Income and Expenses._--All our lectures are usually delivered in
the same hall, built for the purpose.  It will hold 1,200
persons;  900 are thought a large assembly.  The expenses of
rent, lights, doorkeeper, &c. for this hall, would be $12 each
lecture.  The price of $3 is the least that might be demanded for
a single ticket of admission to the course,--perhaps $4;  $5 for
a ticket admitting a gentleman and lady.  So let us suppose we
have 900 persons paying $3 each, or $2,700.  If it should happen,
as did in Prof. Silliman's case, that many more than 900 tickets
were sold, it would be easy to give the course in the day and in
the evening, an expedient sometimes practised to divide an
audience, and because it is a great convenience to many to choose
their time.  If the lectures succeed in Boston, their success is
insured at Salem, a town thirteen miles off, with a population of
15,000.  They might, perhaps, be repeated at Cambridge, three
miles from Boston, and probably at Philadelphia, thirty-six
hours distant.

At New York anything literary has hitherto had no favor.  The
lectures might be fifteen or sixteen in number, of about an hour
each.  They might be delivered, one or two in each week.  And if
they met with sudden success, it would be easy to carry on the
course simultaneously at Salem, and Cambridge, and in the city.
They must be delivered in the winter.

Another plan suggested in addition to this.  A gentleman here is
giving a course of lectures on English literature to a private
class of ladies, at $10 to each subscriber.  There is no doubt,
were you so disposed, you might turn to account any writings in
the bottom of your portfolio, by reading lectures to such a
class, or, still better, by speaking.

_Expense of Living._--You may travel in this country for $4 to
$4.50 a day.  You may board in Boston in a "gigmanic" style for
$8 per week, including all domestic expenses.  Eight dollars per
week is the board paid by the permanent residents at the Tremont
House,--probably the best hotel in North America.  There, and at
the best hotels in New York, the lodger for a few days pays at
the rate of $1.50 per day.  Twice eight dollars would provide a
gentleman and lady with board, chamber, and private parlor, at a
fashionable boardinghouse.  In the country, of course, the
expenses are two thirds less.  These are rates of expense where
economy is not studied.  I think the Liverpool and New York
packets demand $150 of the passenger, and their accommodations
are perfect.  (N.B.--I set down all sums in dollars.  You may
commonly reckon a pound sterling worth $4.80.)  "The man is
certain of success," say those I talk with, "for one winter, but
not afterwards."  That supposes no extraordinary merit in the
lectures, and only regards you in your leonine aspect.  However,
it was suggested that, if Mr. C. would undertake a Journal of
which we have talked much, but which we have never yet produced,
he would do us great service, and we feel some confidence that it
could be made to secure him a support.  It is that project which
I mentioned to you in a letter by Mr. Barnard,--a book to be
called _The Transcendentalist,_ or _The Spiritual Inquirer,_ or
the like, and of which F.H. Hedge* was to be editor.  Those
who are most interested in it designed to make gratuitous
contributions to its pages, until its success could be assured.
Hedge is just leaving our neighborhood to be settled as a
minister two hundred and fifty miles off, in Maine, and entreats
that you will edit the journal.  He will write, and I please
myself with thinking I shall be able to write under such
auspices.  Then you might (though I know not the laws respecting
literary property) collect some of your own writings and reprint
them here.  I think the _Sartor_ would now be sure of a sale.
Your _Life of Schiller,_ and _Wilhelm Meister,_ have been long
reprinted here.  At worst, if you wholly disliked us, and
preferred Old England to New, you can judge of the suggestion of
a knowing man, that you might see Niagara, get a new stock of
health, and pay all your expenses by printing in England a book
of travels in America.

----------
*Now the Rev. Dr. Hedge, late Professor of German and of
Ecclesiastical History in Harvard College.
------------

I wish you to know that we do not depend for your _eclat_ on your
being already known to rich men here.  You are not.  Nothing has
ever been published here designating you by name.  But Dr.
Channing reads and respects you.  That is a fact of importance to
our project.  Several clergymen, Messrs. Frothingham, Ripley,
Francis, all of them scholars and Spiritualists, (some of them,
unluckily, called Unitarian,) love you dearly, and will work
heartily in your behalf.  Mr. Frothing ham, a worthy and
accomplished man, more like Erasmus than Luther, said to me on
parting, the other day, "You cannot express in terms too
extravagant my desire that he should come."  George Ripley,
having heard, through your letter to me, that nobody in England
had responded to the _Sartor,_ had secretly written you a most
reverential letter, which, by dint of coaxing, be read to me,
though he said there was but one step from the sublime to the
ridiculous.  I prayed him, though I thought the letter did him no
justice, save to his heart, to send you it or another;  and he
says he will.  He is a very able young man, even if his letter
should not show it.*  He said he could, and would, bring many
persons to hear you, and you should be sure of his utmost aid.
Dr. Bradford, a medical man, is of good courage. Mr. Loring,** a
lawyer, said,"--Invite Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle to spend a couple of
months at my house," (I assured him I was too selfish for that,)
"and if our people," he said, "cannot find out his worth, I will
subscribe, with, others, to make him whole of any expense he
shall incur in coming."  Hedge promised more than he ought.
There are several persons beside, known to me, who feel a warm
interest in this thing.  Mr. Furness, a popular and excellent
minister in Philadelphia, at whose house Harriet Martineau was
spending a few days, I learned the other day "was feeding Miss
Martineau with the _Sartor._"  And here some of the best women I
know are warm friends of yours, and are much of Mrs. Carlyle's
opinion when she says, Your books shall prosper.

-----------
* Emerson's estimate of Mr. Ripley was justified as the years
went on.  His _Life,_ by Mr. Octavius Frothingham,--like his
father, "a worthy and accomplished, man," but more like Luther
than Erasmus,--forms one of the most attractive volumes of the
series of _Lives of American Men of Letters._

** The late Ellis Gray Loring, a man of high character, well
esteemed in his profession, and widely respected.
----------

On the other hand, I make no doubt you shall be sure of some
opposition.  Andrews Norton, one of our best heads, once a
theological professor, and a destroying critic, lives upon a rich
estate at Cambridge, and frigidly excludes the Diderot paper from
a _Select Journal_ edited by him, with the remark, "Another paper
of the Teufelsdrockh School."  The University perhaps, and much
that is conservative in literature and religion, I apprehend,
will give you its cordial opposition, and what eccentricity can
be collected from the Obituary Notice on Goethe, or from the
_Sartor,_ shall be mustered to demolish you.  Nor yet do I feel
quite certain of this.  If we get a good tide with us, we shall
sweep away the whole inertia, which is the whole force of these
gentlemen, except Norton.  That you do not like the Unitarians
will never hurt you at all, if possibly you do like the
Calvinists.  If you have any friendly relations to your native
Church, fail not to bring a letter from a Scottish Calvinist to a
Calvinist here, and your fortune is made.  But that were too good
to happen.

Since things are so, can you not, my dear sir, finish your new
work and cross the great water in September or October, and try
the experiment of a winter in America?  I cannot but think that
if we do not make out a case strong enough to make you build your
house, at least you should pitch your tent among us.  The country
is, as you say, worth visiting, and to give much pleasure to a
few persons will be some inducement to you.  I am afraid to
press this matter.  To me, as you can divine, it would be an
unspeakable comfort;  and the more, that I hope before that time
so far to settle my own affairs as to have a wife and a house to
receive you.  Tell Mrs. Carlyle, with my affectionate regards,
that some friends whom she does not yet know do hope with me to
have her company for the next winter at our house, and shall not
cease to hope it until you come.

I have many things to say upon the topics of your letter, but my
letter is already so immeasurably long, it must stop.  Long as it
is, I regret I have not more facts.  Dr. Channing is in New York,
or I think, despite your negligence of him, I should have visited
him on account of his interest in you.  Could you see him you
would like him.  I shall write you immediately on learning
anything new bearing on this business.  I intended to have
despatched this letter a day or two sooner, that it might go by
the packet of the 1st of May from New York.  Now it will go by
that of the 8th, and ought to reach you in thirty days.  Send me
your thoughts upon it as soon as you can.  I _jalouse_ of that
new book.  I fear its success may mar my project.

Yours affectionately,
               R. Waldo Emerson




VII. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London
13 May, 1835

Thanks, my kind friend, for the news you again send me.  Good
news, good new friends;  nothing that is not good comes to me
across these waters.  As if the "Golden West" seen by Poets were
no longer a mere optical phenomenon, but growing a reality, and
coining itself into solid blessings!  To me it seems very
strange;  as indeed generally this whole Existence here below
more and more does.

We have seen your Barnard:  a most modest, intelligent, compact,
hopeful-looking man, who will not revisit you without conquests
from his expedition hither.  We expect to see much more of
him;  to instruct him, to learn of him:  especially about that
real-imaginary locality of "Concord," where a kindly-speaking
voice lives incarnated, there is much to learn.

That you will take to yourself a wife is the cheerfulest tidings
you could send us.  It is in no wise meet for man to be alone;
and indeed the beneficent Heavens, in creating Eve, did
mercifully guard against that.  May it prove blessed, this new
arrangement!  I delight to prophesy for you peaceful days in it;
peaceful, not idle;  filled rather with that best activity which
is the stillest.  To the future, or perhaps at this hour actual
Mrs. Emerson, will you offer true wishes from two British
Friends;  who have not seen her with their eyes, but whose
thoughts need not be strangers to the Home she will make for you.
Nay, you add the most chivalrous summons:  which who knows but
one day we may actually stir ourselves to obey!  It may hover for
the present among the gentlest of our day-dreams;  mild-lustrous;
an impossible possibility.  May all go well with you, my worthy
Countryman, Kinsman, and brother Man!

This so astonishing reception of Teufelsdrockh in your
New England circle seems to me not only astonishing, but
questionable;  not, however, to be quarreled with.  I may say:
If the New. England cup is dangerously sweet, there are here in
Old England whole antiseptic floods of good _hop_-decoction;
therein let it mingle;  work wholesomely towards what clear
benefit it can.  Your young ones too, as all exaggeration is
transient, and exaggerated love almost itself a blessing, will
get through it without damage.  As for Fraser, however, the idea
of a new Edition is frightful to him;  or rather ludicrous,
unimaginable.  Of him no man has inquired for a _Sartor:_
in his whole wonderful world of Tory Pamphleteers, Conservative
Younger-brothers, Regent-Street Loungers, Crockford Gamblers, Irish
Jesuits, drunken Reporters, and miscellaneous unclean persons
(whom nitre and much soap will not wash clean), not a soul has
expressed the smallest wish that way.  He shrieks at the idea.
Accordingly I realized these four copies from [him,] all he will
surrender;  and can do no more.  Take them with my blessing.  I
beg you will present one to the honorablest of those "honorable
women";  say to her that her (unknown) image as she reads
shall be to me a bright faultless vision, textured out of
mere sunbeams;  to be loved and worshiped;  the best of all
Transatlantic women!  Do at any rate, in a more business like
style, offer my respectful regards to Dr. Channing, whom
certainly I could not count on for a reader, or other than a
grieved condemnatory one;  for I reckoned tolerance had its
limits.  His own faithful, long-continued striving towards what
is Best, I knew and honored;  that he will let me go my own way
thitherward, with a God-speed from him, is surely a new honor to
us both.

Finally, on behalf of the British world (which is not all
contained in Fraser's shop) I should tell you that various
persons, some of them in a dialect not to be doubted of, have
privately expressed their recognition of this poor Rhapsody,
the best the poor Clothes-Professor could produce in the
circumstances;  nay, I have Scottish Presbyterian Elders who
read, and thank.  So true is what you say about the aptitude of
all natural hearts for receiving what is from the heart spoken to
them.  As face answereth to face!  Brother, if thou wish me to
believe, do thou thyself believe first:  this is as true as that
of the _flere_ and _dolendum;_  perhaps truer.  Wherefore,
putting all things together, cannot I feel that I have washed my
hands of this business in a quite tolerable manner?  Let a man be
thankful;  and on the whole go along, while he has strength left
to go.

This Boston _Transcendentalist,_ whatever the fate or merit of it
prove to be, is surely an interesting symptom.  There must be
things not dreamt of, over in that Transoceanic Parish!  I shall
cordially wish well to this thing;  and hail it as the sure
forerunner of things better.  The Visible becomes the Bestial
when it rests not on the Invisible.  Innumerable tumults of
Metaphysic must be struggled through (whole generations perishing
by the way), and at last Transcendentalism evolve itself (if I
construe aright), as the _Euthanasia_ of Metaphysic altogether.
May it be sure, may it be speedy!  Thou shalt open thy _eyes,_ O
Son of Adam;  thou shalt _look,_ and not forever jargon about
_laws_ of Optics and the making of spectacles!  For myself, I
rejoice very much that I seem to be flinging aside innumerable
sets of spectacles (could I but _lay_ them aside,--with
gentleness!) and hope one day actually to see a thing or two.
Man _lives_ by Belief (as it was well written of old);  by logic
he can only at best long to live.  Oh, I am dreadfully, afflicted
with Logic here, and wish often (in my haste) that I had the
besom of destruction to lay to it for a little!

"Why? and WHEREFORE?  God wot, simply THEREFORE!  Ask not WHY;
't is SITH thou hast to care for."

Since I wrote last to you, (which seems some three months ago,)
there has a great mischance befallen me:  the saddest, I think,
of the kind called Accidents I ever had to front.  By dint of
continual endeavor for many weary weeks, I had got the first
volume of that miserable _French Revolution_ rather handsomely
finished:  from amid infinite contradictions I felt as if my head
were fairly above water, and I could go on writing my poor Book,
defying the Devil and the World, with a certain degree of
assurance, and even of joy.  A Friend borrowed this volume of
Manuscript,--a kind Friend but a careless one,--to write notes on
it, which he was well qualified to do.  One evening about two
months ago he came in on us, "distraction (literally) in his
aspect";  the Manuscript, left carelessly out, had been torn up
as waste paper, and all but three or four tatters was clean gone!
I could not complain, or the poor man seemed as if he would have
shot himself:  we had to gather ourselves together, and show a
smooth front to it;  which happily, though difficult, was not
impossible to do.  I began again at the beginning;  to such a
wretched paralyzing torpedo of a task as my hand never found to
do:  at which I have worn myself these two months to the hue of
saffron, to the humor of incipient desperation;  and now, four
days ago, perceiving well that I was like a man swimming in an
element that grew ever rarer, till at last it became vacuum
(think of that!)  I with a new effort of self-denial sealed up
all the paper fragments, and said to myself:  In this mood thou
makest no way, writest _nothing_ that requires not to be erased
again;  lay it by for one complete week!  And so it lies, under
lock and key.  I have digested the whole misery;  I say, if thou
canst _never_ write this thing, why then never do write it:
God's Universe will go along _better_--without it.  My Belief
in a special Providence grows yearly stronger, unsubduable,
impregnable:  however, you see all the mad increase of entanglement
I have got to strive with, and will pity me in it.  Bodily
exhaustion (and "Diana in the shape of bile")* I will at least
try to exclude from the controversy.  By God's blessing, perhaps
the Book shall yet be written;  but I find it will not do,
by sheer direct force;  only by gentler side-methods.  I have
much else to write too:  I feel often as if with one year of
health and peace I could write something considerable;--the image
of which sails dim and great through my head.  Which year of
health and peace, God, if He see meet, will give me yet;  or
withhold from me, as shall be for the best.

---------
* This allusion to Diana as an obstruction was a favorite one
with Carlyle. "Sir Hudibras, according to Butler, was about to do
a dreadful homicide,--an all-important catastrophe,--and had
drawn his pistol with that full intent, and would decidedly have
done it, had not, says Butler, 'Diana in the shape of rust'
imperatively intervened.  A miracle she has occasionally wrought
upon me in other shapes."  So wrote Carlyle in a letter in 1874.
---------

I have dwelt and swum now for about a year in this World-Maelstrom
of London;  with much pain, which however has given me many
thoughts, more than a counterbalance for that.  Hitherto there
is no outlook, but confusion, darkness, innumerable things
against which a man must "set his face like a flint."  Madness
rules the world, as it has generally done:  one cannot,
unhappily, without loss, say to it, Rule then;  and yet must say
it.--However, in two months more I expect my good Brother from
Italy (a brave fellow, who is a great comfort to me);  we are
then for Scotland to gather a little health, to consider
ourselves a little.  I must have this Book done before anything
else will prosper with me.

Your American Pamphlets got to hand only a few days ago;  worthy
old Rich had them not originally;  seemed since to have been
oblivious, out of Town, perhaps unwell.  I called one day, and
unearthed them.  Those papers you marked I have read.  Genuine
endeavor;  which may the Heavens forward!--In this poor Country
all is swallowed up in the barren Chaos of Politics:  Ministries
tumbled out, Ministries tumbled in;  all things (a fearful
substratum of "Ignorance and Hunger" weltering and heaving under
them) apparently in rapid progress towards--the melting-pot.
There will be news from England by and by:  many things have
reached their term;  Destiny "with lame foot" has overtaken them,
and there will be a reckoning.  O blessed are you where,
what jargoning soever there be at Washington, the poor man
(_un_governed can govern himself) shoulders his age, and walks
into the Western Woods, sure of a nourishing Earth and an
overarching Sky!  It is verily the Door of Hope to distracted
Europe;  which otherwise I should see crumbling down into
blackness of darkness.--That too shall be for good.

I wish I had anything to send you besides these four poor
Pamphlets;  but I fear there is nothing going.  Our Ex-Chancellor
has been promulgating triticalities (significant as novelties,
when _he_ with his wig and lordhood utters them) against the
Aristocracy;  whereat the upper circles are terribly scandalized.
In Literature, except a promised or obtained (but to me still
unknown) volume of Wordsworth, nothing nameworthy doing.--Did I
tell you that I _saw_ Wordsworth this winter?  Twice, at
considerable length;  with almost no disappointment.  He is a
_natural_ man (which means whole immensities here and now);
flows like a natural well yielding mere wholesomeness,--though,
as it would not but seem to me, in _small_ quantity, and
astonishingly _diluted._  Franker utterance of mere garrulities
and even platitudes I never heard from any man;  at least never,
whom I could _honor_ for uttering them.  I am thankful for
Wordsworth;  as in great darkness and perpetual _sky-rockets_ and
_coruscations,_ one were for the smallest clear-burning farthing
candle.  Southey also I saw;  a far _cleverer_ man in speech, yet
a considerably smaller man.  Shovel-hatted;  the shovel-hat is
_grown_ to him:  one must take him as he is.

The second leaf is done;  I must not venture on another.  God
bless you, my worthy Friend;  you and her who is to be yours!  My
Wife bids me send heartiest wishes and regards from her too
across the Sea.  Perhaps we shall all meet one another some day,
--if not Here, then Yonder!

Faithfully always,
                 T. Carlyle




VIII.  Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 27 June, 1835

My Dear Friend,--Your very kind Letter has been in my hand these
four weeks,--the subject of much meditation, which has not yet
cleared itself into anything like a definite practical issue.
Indeed, the conditions of the case are still not wholly before
me:  for if the American side of it, thanks to your perspicuous
minuteness, is now tolerably plain, the European side continues
dubious, too dim for a decision.  So much in my own position here
is vague, not to be measured;  then there is a Brother, coming
home to me from Italy, almost daily expected now;  whose ulterior
resolutions cannot but be influential on mine;  for we are
Brothers in the old good sense, and have one heart and one
interest and object, and even one purse;  and Jack is a _good
man,_ for whom I daily thank Heaven, as for one of its principal
mercies.  He is Traveling Physician to the Countess of Clare,
well entreated by her and hers;  but, I think, weary of that
inane element of "the English Abroad," and as good as determined
to have done with it;  to seek _work_ (he sees not well how), if
possible, with wages;  but even almost _without,_ or with the
lowest endurable, if need be.  Work and wages:  the two prime
necessities of man!  It is pity they should ever be disjoined;
yet of the two, if one _must,_ in this mad Earth, be dispensed
with, it is really wise to say at all hazards, Be it the wages
then.  This Brother (if the Heavens have been kind to me) must be
in Paris one of these days;  then here speedily;  and "the House
must resolve itself into a Committee"--of ways and means.  Add to
all this, that I myself have been and am one of the stupidest of
living men;  in one of my vacant, interlunar conditions, unfit
for deciding on anything:  were I to give you my actual _view_ of
this case, it were a view such as Satan had from the pavilion of
the Anarch old.  Alas! it is all too like Chaos:  confusion of
dense and rare:  I also know what it is to drop _plumb,_
fluttering my pennons vain,--for a series of weeks.

One point only is clear:  that you, my Friend, are very friendly
to me;  that New England is as much my country and home as Old
England.  Very singular and very pleasant it is to me to feel as
if I had a _house of my own_ in that far country:  so many
leagues and geographical degrees of wild-weltering "unfruitful
brine";  and then the hospitable hearth and the smiles of
brethren awaiting one there!  What with railways, steamships,
printing presses, it has surely become a most _monstrous_
"tissue," this life of ours;  if evil and confusion in the one
Hemisphere, then good and order in the other, a man knows not
how:  and so it rustles forth, immeasurable, from "that roaring
Loom of Time,"--miraculous ever as of old!  To Ralph Waldo
Emerson, however, and those that love me as he, be thanks always,
and a sure place in the sanctuary of the mind.  Long shall we
remember that Autumn Sunday that landed him (out of Infinite
Space) on the Craigenputtock wilderness, not to leave us as he
found us.  My Wife says, whatever I decide on, I cannot thank you
too heartily;--which really is very sound doctrine.  I write to
tell you so much;  and that you shall hear from me again when
there is more to tell.

It does seem next to certain to me that I could preach a very
considerable quantity of things from that Boston Pulpit, such as
it is,--were I once fairly started.  If so, what an unspeakable
relief were it too!  Of the whole mountain of miseries one
grumbles at in this life, the central and parent one, as I often
say, is that you cannot utter yourself.  The poor soul sits
struggling, impatient, longing vehemently out towards all corners
of the Universe, and cannot get its hest delivered, not even so
far as the voice might do it.  Imprisoned, enchanted, like the
Arabian Prince with half his body marble:  it is really bad work.
Then comes bodily sickness;  to act and react, and double the
imbroglio.  Till at last, I suppose, one does rise, like Eliphaz
the Temanite;  states that his inner man is bursting (as if
filled with carbonic acid and new wine), that by the favor of
Heaven he will speak a word or two.  Would it were come so far,--
if it be ever to come!

On the whole I think the odds are that I shall some time or other
get over to you;  but that for this winter I ought not to go.  My
London expedition is not decided hitherto;  I have begun various
relations and arrangements, which it were questionable to cut
short so soon.  That beggarly Book, were there nothing else,
hampers me every way.  To fling it once for all into the fire
were perhaps the best;  yet I grudge to do that.  To finish it,
on the other hand, is denied me for the present, or even so much
as to work at it.  What am I to do?  When my Brother arrives, we
go all back to Scotland for some weeks:  there, in seclusion,
with such calmness as I can find or create, the plan for the
winter must be settled.  You shall hear from me then;  let us
hope something more reasonable than I can write at present.  For
about a month I have gone to and fro utterly _idle:_  understand
that, and I need explain no more.  The wearied machine refused to
be urged any farther;  after long spasmodic struggling comes
collapse.  The burning of that wretched Manuscript has really
been a sore business for me.  Nevertheless that too shall clear
itself, and prove a _favor_ of the Upper Powers:  _tomorrow_ to
fresh fields and pastures new!  This monstrous London has taught
me several things during the past year;  for if its Wisdom be of
the most uninstructive ever heard of by that name of wisdom, its
Folly abounds with lessons,--which one ought to learn.  I feel
(with my burnt manuscript) as if defeated in this campaign;
defeated, yet not altogether disgraced.  As the great Fritz said,
when the battle had gone against him, "Another time we will
do better."

As to Literature, Politics, and the whole multiplex aspect of
existence here, expect me not to say one word.  We are a singular
people, in a singular condition.  Not many nights ago, in one of
those phenomenal assemblages named routs, whither we had gone to
see the countenance of O'Connell and Company (the Tail was a
Peacock's tail, with blonde muslin women and heroic Parliamentary
men), one of the company, a "distinguished female" (as we call
them), informed my Wife "O'Connell was the master-spirit of this
age."  If so, then for what we have received let us be thankful,
--and enjoy it _without_ criticism.--It often painfully seems to
me as if much were coming fast to a crisis here;  as if the
crown-wheel had given way, and the whole horologe were rushing
rapidly down, down, to its end!  Wreckage is swift;  rebuilding
is slow and distant.  Happily another than we has charge of it.

My new American Friends have come and gone.  Barnard went off
northward some fortnight ago, furnished with such guidance and
furtherance as I could give him.  Professor Longfellow went about
the same time;  to Sweden, then to Berlin and Germany:  we saw
him twice or thrice, and his ladies, with great pleasure;  as one
sees worthy souls from a far country, who cannot abide with you,
who throw you a kind greeting as they pass.  I inquired
considerably about Concord, and a certain man there;  one of the
fair pilgrims told me several comfortable things.  By the bye,
how very good you are, in regard to this of Unitarianism!  I
declare, I am ashamed of my intolerance:--and yet you have ceased
to be a Teacher of theirs, have you not?  I mean to address you
this time by the secular title of Esquire;  as if I liked you
better so.  But truly, in black clothes or in white, by this
style or by that, the man himself can never be other than welcome
to me.  You will further allow me to fancy that you are now
wedded;  and offer our united congratulations and kindest good
wishes to that new fair Friend of ours, whom one day we shall
surely know more of,--if the Fates smile.

My sheet is ending, and I must not burden you with double postage
for such stuff as this.  By dint of some inquiry I have learnt
the law of the American Letter-carrying;  and I now mention it
for our mutual benefit.  There are from New York to London three
packets monthly (on the 1st, on the 10th, on the 20th);  the
masters of these carry Letters gratis for all men;  and put the
same into the Post-Office;  there are some pence charged on the
score of "Ship-letter" there, and after that, the regular postage
of the country, if the Letter has to go farther.  I put this,
for example, into a place called North and South American
Coffee-house in the City here, and pay twopence for it, and it
flies.  Doubtless there is some similar receiving-house with its
"leather bag" somewhere in New York, and fixed days (probably the
same as our days) for emptying, or rather for tying and despatching,
said leather bag:  if you deal with the London Packets (so long as
I am here) in preference to the Liverpool ones, it will all be
well.  As for the next Letter, (if you write as I hope you may
before hearing from me again,) pray direct it, "Care of John
Mill, Esq., India House, London";  and he will forward it
directly, should I even be still absent in the North.--Now will
you write? and pray write something about yourself.  We both love
you here, and send you all good prayers.  _Vale faveque!_

Yours ever,
       T. Carlyle



IX.  Emerson to Carlyle*

Concord, 7 October, 1835

My Dear Friend,--Please God I will never again sit six weeks of
this short human life over a letter of yours without answering it.

-----------
* The original of this letter is missing;  what is printed here
is from the rough draft.
-----------

I received in August your letter of June, and just then hearing
that a lady, a little lady with a mighty heart, Mrs. Child,* whom
I scarcely know but do much respect, was about to visit England
(invited thither for work's sake by the African or Abolition
Society) and that she begged an introduction to you, I used
the occasion to say the godsend was come, and that I would
acknowledge it as soon as three then impending tasks were ended.
I have now learned that Mrs. Child was detained for weeks in New
York and did not sail. Only last night I received your letter
written in May, with the four copies of the _Sartor,_ which by a
strange oversight have been lying weeks, probably months, in the
Custom-House.  On such provocation I can sit still no longer.

------------
* The excellent Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, whose romance of
_Philothea_ was published in this year, 1835.

  "If her heart at high floods swamps her brain now and then,
  'T is but richer for that when the tide ebbs agen."

says Lowell, in his _Fable for Critics._
-----------

The three tasks were, a literary address;  a historical discourse
on the two-hundredth anniversary of our little town of Concord*
(my first adventure in print, which I shall send you);  the
third, my marriage, now happily consummated.  All three, from the
least to the greatest, trod so fast upon each other's heel as to
leave me, who am a slow and awkward workman, no interstice big
enough for a letter that should hope to convey any information.
Again I waited that the Discourse might go in his new jacket to
show how busy I had been, but the creeping country press has not
dressed it yet.  Now congratulate me, my friend, as indeed you
have already done, that I live with my wife in my own house,
waiting on the good future.  The house is not large, but
convenient and very elastic.  The more hearts (specially great
hearts) it holds, the better it looks and feels.  I have not had
so much leisure yet but that the fact of having ample space to
spread my books and blotted paper is still gratifying.  So know
now that your rooms in America wait for you, and that my wife is
making ready a closet for Mrs. Carlyle.

----------
* "A Historical Discourse, delivered before the Citizens of
Concord, 12th September, 1835, on the Second Centennial
Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town.  By Ralph Waldo
Emerson.  Published by Request.  Concord:  G.F. Bemis, Printer.
1835."  8vo, pp. 52.--A discourse worthy of the author and of the
town.  It is reprinted in the eleventh volume of Emerson's Works,
Boston, 1883.
-----------

I could cry at the disaster that has befallen you in the loss of
the book.  My brother Charles says the only thing the friend
could do on such an occasion was to shoot himself, and wishes to
know if he have done so.  Such mischance might well quicken one's
curiosity to know what Oversight there is of us, and I greet you
well upon your faith and the resolution issuing out of it.  You
have certainly found a right manly consolation, and can afford to
faint and rest a month or two on the laurels of such endeavor.  I
trust ere this you have re-collected the entire creation out of
the secret cells where, under the smiles of every Muse, it first
took life.  Believe, when you are weary, that you who stimulate
and rejoice virtuous young men do not write a line in vain.  And
whatever betide us in the inexorable future, what is better than
to have awaked in many men the sweet sense of beauty, and to
double the courage of virtue.  So do not, as you will not, let
the imps from all the fens of weariness and apathy have a minute
too much.  To die of feeding the fires of others were sweet,
since it were not death but multiplication.  And yet I hold to a
more orthodox immortality too.

This morning in happiest time I have a letter from George Ripley,
who tells me you have written him, and that you say pretty
confidently you will come next summer.  _Io paean!_  He tells me
also that Alexander Everett (brother of Edward) has sent you the
friendly notice that has just appeared in the _North American
Review,_ with a letter.*  All which I hope you have received.  I
am delighted, for this man represents a clique to which I am a
stranger, and which I supposed might not love you.  It must be
you shall succeed when Saul prophesies.  Indeed, I have heard
that you may hear the _Sartor_ preached from some of our best
pulpits and lecture-rooms.  Don't think I speak of myself, for I
cherish carefully a salutary horror at the German style, and hold
off my admiration as long as ever I can.  But all my importance
is quite at an end.  For now that Doctors of Divinity and the
solemn Review itself have broke silence to praise you, I have
quite lost my plume as your harbinger.

-----------
* Mr. A.H. Everett's paper on _Sartor Resartus_ was published in
the _North American Review_ for October, 1835.
-----------

I read with interest what you say of the political omens in
England.  I could wish our country a better comprehension of its
felicity.  But government has come to be a trade, and is managed
solely on commercial principles.  A man plunges into politics to
make his fortune, and only cares that the world should last his
day.  We have had in different parts of the country mobs and
moblike legislation, and even moblike judicature, which have
betrayed an almost godless state of society;  so that I begin to
think even here it behoves every man to quit his dependency on
society as much as he can, as he would learn to go without
crutches that will be soon plucked away from him, and settle with
himself the principles he can stand upon, happen what may.  There
is reading, and public lecturing too, in this country, that I
could recommend as medicine to any gentleman who finds the love
of life too strong in him.

If virtue and friendship have not yet become fables, do believe
we keep your face for the living type.  I was very glad to hear
of the brother you describe, for I have one too, and know what it
is to have presence in two places.  Charles Chauncy Emerson is a
lawyer now settled in this town, and, as I believe, no better
Lord Hamlet was ever.  He is our Doctor on all questions of
taste, manners, or action.  And one of the pure pleasures I
promise myself in the months to come is to make you two gentlemen
know each other.




X.  Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, Mass., 8 April, 1856

My Dear Friend,--I am concerned at not hearing from you.  I have
written you two letters, one in October, one in November, I
believe, since I had any tidings of you.*  Your last letter is
dated 27 June, 1835.  I have counted all the chances of delay and
miscarriage, and still am anxious lest you are ill, or have
forgotten us.  I have looked at the advertising sheet of the
booksellers, but it promised nothing of the _History._  I thought
I had made the happiest truce with sorrow in having the promise
of your coming,--I was to take possession of a new kingdom of
virtue and friendship.  Let not the new wine mourn.  Speak to me
out of the wide silence.  Many friends inquire of me concerning
you, and you must write some word immediately on receipt of
this sheet.

------------
* One in August by Mrs. Child, apparently not delivered, and one,
the preceding, in October.
-----------

With it goes an American reprint of the _Sartor._  Five hundred
copies only make the edition, at one dollar a copy.  About one
hundred and fifty copies are subscribed for.  How it will be
received I know not.  I am not very sanguine, for I often hear
and read somewhat concerning its repulsive style.  Certainly, I
tell them, it is very odd.  Yet I read a chapter lately with
great pleasure.  I send you also, with Dr. Channing's regards and
good wishes, a copy of his little work, lately published, on our
great local question of Slavery.

You must have written me since July.  I have reckoned upon
your projected visit the ensuing summer or autumn, and have
conjectured the starlike influences of a new spiritual element.
Especially Lectures.  My own experiments for one or two winters,
and the readiness with which you embrace the work, have led me to
think much and to expect much from this mode of addressing men.
In New England the Lyceum, as we call it, is already a great
institution.  Beside the more elaborate courses of lectures in
the cities, every country town has its weekly evening meeting,
called a Lyceum, and every professional man in the place is
called upon, in the course of the winter, to entertain his
fellow-citizens with a discourse on whatever topic.  The topics
are miscellaneous as heart can wish.  But in Boston, Lowell,
Salem, courses are given by individuals.  I see not why this is
not the most flexible of all organs of opinion, from its
popularity and from its newness permitting you to say what you
think, without any shackles of prescription.  The pulpit in our
age certainly gives forth an obstructed and uncertain sound, and
the faith of those in it, if men of genius, may differ so much
from that of those under it, as to embarrass the conscience of
the speaker, because so much is attributed to him from the fact
of standing there.  In the Lyceum nothing is presupposed.  The
orator is only responsible for what his lips articulate.  Then
what scope it allows!  You may handle every member and relation
of humanity.  What could Homer, Socrates, or St. Paul say that
cannot be said here?  The audience is of all classes, and its
character will be determined always by the name of the lecturer.
Why may you not give the reins to your wit, your pathos, your
philosophy, and become that good despot which the virtuous
orator is?

Another thing.  I am persuaded that, if a man speak well, he
shall find this a well-rewarded work in New England.  I have
written this year ten lectures;  I had written as many last year.
And for reading both these and those at places whither I was
invited, I have received this last winter about three hundred and
fifty dollars.  Had I, in lieu of receiving a lecturer's fee,
myself advertised that I would deliver these in certain places,
these receipts would have been greatly increased.  I insert all
this because my prayers for you in this country are quite of a
commercial spirit.  If you lose no dollar by us, I shall joyfully
trust your genius and virtue for your satisfaction on all
other points.

I cannot remember that there are any other mouthpieces that are
specially vital at this time except Criticism and Parliamentary
Debate.  I think this of ours would possess in the hands of a
great genius great advantages over both.  But what avail any
commendations of the form, until I know that the man is alive and
well?  If you love them that love you, write me straightway of
your welfare.  My wife desires to add to mine her friendliest
greetings to Mrs. Carlyle and to yourself.

Yours affectionately,
                 R. Waldo Emerson

I ought to say that Le-Baron Russell, a worthy young man
who studies Engineering, did cause the republication of
Teufelsdrockh.*  I trust you shall yet see a better American
review of it than the _North American._

------------
* This first edition of _Sartor_ as an independent volume was
published by James Munroe and Company, Boston.  Emerson, at Mr.
(now Dr.) Russell's request, wrote a Preface for the book.  He
told Dr. Russell that his brother Charles was not pleased
with the Preface, thinking it "too commonplace, too much like
all prefaces."
-----------




XI. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London
29 April, 1836

My Dear Emerson,--Barnard is returning across the water, and must
not go back without a flying salutation for you.  These many
weeks I have had your letter by me;  these many weeks I have felt
always that it deserved and demanded a grateful answer;  and,
alas! also that I could give it none.  It is impossible for you
to figure what mood I am in.  One sole thought, That Book! that
weary Book! occupies me continually:  wreck and confusion of all
kinds go tumbling and falling around me, within me;  but to wreck
and growth, to confusion and order, to the world at large, I turn
a deaf ear;  and have life only for this one thing,--which also
in general I feel to be one of the pitifulest that ever man went
about possessed with.  Have compassion for me!  It is really very
miserable:  but it will end.  Some months more, and it is
_ended;_  and I am done with _French Revolution,_ and with
Revolution and Revolt in general;  and look once more with
free eyes over this Earth, where are other things than mean
internecine work of that kind:  things fitter for me, under the
bright Sun, on this green Mother's-bosom (though the Devil does
dwell in it)!  For the present, really, it is like a Nessus'
shirt, burning you into madness, this wretched Enterprise;  nay,
it is also like a kind of Panoply, rendering you invulnerable,
insensible, to all _other_ mischiefs.

I got the fatal First Volume finished (in the miserablest way,
after great efforts) in October last;  my head was all in a
whirl;  I fled to Scotland and my Mother for a month of rest.
Rest is nowhere for the Son of Adam:  all looked so "spectral" to
me in my old-familiar Birthland;  Hades itself could not have
seemed stranger;  Annandale also was part of the kingdom of TIME.
Since November I have worked again as I could;  a second volume
got wrapped up and sealed out of my sight within the last three
days.  There is but a Third now:  one pull more, and then!  It
seems to me, I will fly into some obscurest cranny of the world,
and lie silent there for a twelvemonth.  The mind is weary, the
body is very sick;  a little black speck dances to and fro in the
left eye (part of the retina protesting against the liver, and
striking work):  I cannot help it;  it must flutter and dance
there, like a signal of distress, unanswered till I be done.  My
familiar friends tell me farther that the Book is all wrong,
style cramp, &c., &c.:  my friends, I answer, you are very right;
but this also, Heaven be my witness, I cannot help.--In such sort
do I live here;  all this I had to write you, if I wrote at all.

For the rest I cannot say that this huge blind monster of a City
is without some sort of charm for me.  It leaves one alone, to go
his own road unmolested.  Deep in your soul you take up your
protest against it, defy it, and even despise it;  but need not
divide yourself from it for that.  Worthy individuals are glad to
hear your thought, if it have any sincerity;  they do not
exasperate themselves or you about it;  they have not even time
for such a thing.  Nay, in stupidity itself on a scale of this
magnitude, there is an impressiveness, almost a sublimity;  one
thinks how, in the words of Schiller, "the very Gods fight
against it in vain";  how it lies on its unfathomable foundations
there, inert yet peptic;  nay, eupeptic;  and is a _Fact_ in the
world, let theory object as it will.  Brown-stout, in quantities
that would float a seventy-four, goes down the throats of men;
and the roaring flood of life pours on;--over which Philosophy
and Theory are but a poor shriek of remonstrance, which oftenest
were wiser, perhaps, to hold its peace.  I grow daily to honor
Facts more and more, and Theory less and less.  A Fact, it seems
to me, is a great thing:  a Sentence printed if not by God, then
at least by the Devil;--neither Jeremy Bentham nor Lytton Bulwer
had a hand in _that._

There are two or three of the best souls here I have known for
long:  I feel less alone with them;  and yet one is alone,--a
stranger and a pilgrim.  These friends expect mainly that the
Church of England is not dead but asleep;  that the leather
coaches, with their gilt panels, can be peopled again with a
living Aristocracy, instead of the simulacra of such.  I must
altogether hold my peace to this, as I do to much.  Coleridge is
the Father of all these.  _Ay de mi!_

But to look across the "divine salt-sea."  A letter reached me,
some two months ago, from Mobile, Alabama;  the writer, a kind
friend of mine, signs himself James Freeman Clarke.*  I have
mislaid, not lost his Letter;  and do not at present know his
permanent address (for he seemed to be only on a visit at
Mobile);  but you, doubtless, do know it.  Will you therefore
take or even find an opportunity to tell this good Friend that it
is not the wreckage of the Liverpool ship he wrote by, nor
insensibility on my part, that prevents his hearing direct from
me;  that I see him, and love him in this Letter;  and hope we
shall meet one day under the Sun, shall live under it, at any
rate, with many a kind thought towards one another.

----------
* Now the Rev. Dr. Clarke, of Boston.
----------

The _North American Review_ you spoke of never came (I mean that
copy of it with the Note in it);  but another copy became rather
public here, to the amusement of some.  I read the article
myself:  surely this Reviewer, who does not want in [sense]*
otherwise, is an original:  either a _thrice_-plied quiz
(_Sartor's_  "Editor" a twice-plied one);  or else opening on you
a grandeur of still Dulness, rarely to be met with on earth.

-------------
* The words supplied here were lost under the seal of the letter.
-------------

My friend!  I must end here.  Forgive me till I get done with
this Book.  Can you have the generosity to write, _without_ an
answer?  Well, if you can_not,_ I will answer.  Do not forget me.
My love and my Wife's to your good Lady, to your Brother, and all
friends.  Tell me what you do;  what your world does.  As for my
world, take this (which I rendered from the German Voss, a tough
old-Teutonic fellow) for the best I can say of it:--

     "As journeys this Earth, her eye on a Sun, through the
heavenly spaces,
     And, radiant in azure, or Sunless, swallowed in tempests,
     Falters not, alters not;  journeying equal, sunlit or
stormgirt
     So thou, Son of Earth, who hast Force,
     Goal, and Time, go still onwards."

Adieu, my dear friend!  Believe me ever Yours,
                                     Thomas Carlyle




XII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, Massachusetts, 17 September, 1836

My Dear Friend,--I hope you do not measure my love by the
tardiness of my messages.  I have few pleasures like that of
receiving your kind and eloquent letters.  I should be most
impatient of the long interval between one and another, but that
they savor always of Eternity, and promise me a friendship and
friendly inspiration not reckoned or ended by days or years.
Your last letter, dated in April, found me a mourner, as did your
first.  I have lost out of this world my brother Charles,* of
whom I have spoken to you,--the friend and companion of many
years, the inmate of my house, a man of a beautiful genius, born
to speak well, and whose conversation for these last years has
treated every grave question of humanity, and has been my daily
bread.  I have put so much dependence on his gifts that we made
but one man together;  for I needed never to do what he could do
by noble nature much better than I.  He was to have been married
in this month, and at the time of his sickness and sudden
death I was adding apartments to my house for his permanent
accommodation.  I wish that you could have known him.  At
twenty-seven years the best life is only preparation.  He built
his foundation so large that it needed the full age of man to make
evident the plan and proportions of his character.  He postponed
always a particular to a final and absolute success, so that his
life was a silent appeal to the great and generous.  But some
time I shall see you and speak of him.

---------
* Charles Chauncy Emerson,--died May 9, 1836,--whose memory still
survives fresh and beautiful in the hearts of the few who remain
who knew him in life.  A few papers of his published in the
_Dial_ show to others what he was and what he might have become.
-----------

We want but two or three friends, but these we cannot do without,
and they serve us in every thought we think.  I find now I must
hold faster the remaining jewels of my social belt.  And of you I
think much and anxiously since Mrs. Channing, amidst her delight
at what she calls the happiest hour of her absence, in her
acquaintance with you and your family, expresses much uneasiness
respecting your untempered devotion to study.  I am the more
disturbed by her fears, because your letters avow a self-devotion
to your work, and I know there is no gentle dulness in your
temperament to counteract the mischief.  I fear Nature has not
inlaid fat earth enough into your texture to keep the ethereal
blade from whetting it through.  I write to implore you to be
careful of your health.  You are the property of all whom you
rejoice in art and soul, and you must not deal with your body as
your own.  O my friend, if you would come here and let me nurse
you and pasture you in my nook of this long continent, I will
thank God and you therefor morning and evening, and doubt not to
give you, in a quarter of a year, sound eyes, round cheeks, and
joyful spirits.  My wife has been lately an invalid, but she
loves you thoroughly, and hardly stores a barrel of flour or lays
her new carpet without some hopeful reference to Mrs. Carlyle.
And in good earnest, why cannot you come here forthwith, and
deliver in lectures to the solid men of Boston the _History of
the French Revolution_ before it is published,--or at least
whilst it is publishing in England, and before it is published
here.  There is no doubt of the perfect success of such a course
now that the _five hundred copies of the Sartor are all sold,_
and read with great delight by many persons.

This I suggest if you too must feel the vulgar necessity of
_doing;_  but if you will be governed by your friend, you shall
come into the meadows, and rest and talk with your friend in my
country pasture.  If you will come here like a noble brother, you
shall have your solid day undisturbed, except at the hours of
eating and walking;  and as I will abstain from you myself,
so I will defend you from others.  I entreat Mrs. Carlyle,
with my affectionate remembrances, to second me in this
proposition, and not suffer the wayward man to think that in
these space-destroying days a prayer from Boston, Massachusetts,
is any less worthy of serious and prompt granting than one
from Edinburgh or Oxford.

I send you a little book I have just now published, as
an entering wedge, I hope, for something more worthy and
significant.*  This is only a naming of topics on which I would
gladly speak and gladlier hear.  I am mortified to learn the ill
fate of my former packet containing the _Sartor_ and Dr.
Channing's work.  My mercantile friend is vexed, for he says
accurate orders were given to send it as a packet, not as a
letter.  I shall endeavor before despatching this sheet to obtain
another copy of our American edition.

-----------
* This was _Nature,_ the first clear manifesto of Emerson's
genius.
-----------

I wish I could come to you instead of sending this sheet of
paper.  I think I should persuade you to get into a ship this
Autumn, quit all study for a time, and follow the setting sun.  I
have many, many things to learn of you.  How melancholy to think
how much we need confession!...*  Yet the great truths are always
at hand, and all the tragedy of individual life is separated how
thinly from that universal nature which obliterates all ranks,
all evils, all individualities.  How little of you is in your
_will!_  Above your will how intimately are you related to all of
us!  In God we meet.  Therein we _are,_ thence we descend upon
Time and these infinitesimal facts of Christendom, and Trade, and
England Old and New.  Wake the soul now drunk with a sleep, and
we overleap at a bound the obstructions, the griefs, the
mistakes, of years, and the air we breathe is so vital that the
Past serves to contribute nothing to the result.

-----------
** Some words appear to be lost here.
-----------

I read Goethe, and now lately the posthumous volumes, with a
great interest.  A friend of mine who studies his life with care
would gladly know what records there are of his first ten years
after his settlement at Weimar, and what Books there are in
Germany about him beside what Mrs. Austin has collected and
Heine.  Can you tell me?

Write me of your health, or else come.

Yours ever,
      R.W. Emerson.

P.S.--I learn that an acquaintance is going to England, so send
the packet by him.




XIII. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 5 November, 1836

My Dear Friend,--You are very good to write to me in my silence,
in the mood you must be in.  My silence you may well judge is not
forgetfulness;  it is a forced silence;  which this kind Letter
enforces into words.  I write the day after your letter comes,
lest the morrow bring forth something new to hinder me.

What a bereavement, my Friend, is this that has overtaken you!
Such a Brother, with such a Life opening around him, like a
blooming garden where he was to labor and gather, all vanished
suddenly like frostwork, and hidden from your eye!  It is a loss,
a sore loss;  which God had appointed you.  I do not tell you not
to mourn:  I mourn with you, and could wish all mourners the
spirit you have in this sorrow.  Oh, I know it well!  Often
enough in this noisy Inanity of a vision where _we_ still linger,
I say to myself, Perhaps thy Buried Ones are not far from thee,
are with thee;  they are in Eternity, which is a Now and HERE!
And yet Nature will have her right;  Memory would feel desecrated
if she could forget.  Many times in the crowded din of the
Living, some sight, some feature of a face, will recall to you
the Loved Face;  and in these turmoiling streets you see the
little silent Churchyard, the green grave that lies there so
silent, inexpressibly _wae._  O, perhaps we _shall_ all meet
YONDER, and the tears be wiped from all eyes!  One thing is no
Perhaps:  surely we _shall_ all meet, if it be the will of the
Maker of us.  If it be not His will,--then is it not better so?
Silence,--since in these days we have no speech!  Eye hath not
seen, nor ear heard, in any day.

You inquire so earnestly about my welfare;  hold open still the
hospitable door for me.  Truly Concord, which I have sought out
on the Map, seems worthy of its name:  no dissonance comes to me
from that side;  but grief itself has acquired a harmony:  in joy
or grief a voice says to me, Behold there is one that loves thee;
in thy loneliness, in thy darkness, see how a hospitable candle
shines from far over seas, how a friendly heart watches!  It is
very good, and precious for me.

As for my health, be under no apprehension.  I am always sick;  I
am sicker and worse in body and mind, a little, for the present;
but it has no deep significance:  it is _weariness_ merely;  and
now, by the bounty of Heaven, I am as it were within sight
of land.  In two months more, this unblessed Book will be
_finished;_  at Newyearday we begin printing:  before the end of
March, the thing is out;  and I am a free man!  Few happinesses I
have ever known will equal that, as it seems to me.  And yet I
ought not to call the poor Book unblessed:  no, it has girdled me
round like a panoply these two years;  kept me invulnerable,
indifferent, to innumerable things.  The poorest man in London
has perhaps been one of the freest:  the roaring press of gigs
and gigmen, with their gold blazonry and fierce gig-wheels, have
little incommoded him;  they going their way, he going his.--As
for the results of the Book, I can rationally promise myself, on
the economical, pecuniary, or otherwise worldly side, simply
_zero._  It is a Book contradicting all rules of Formalism, that
have not a Reality within them, which so few have;--testifying,
the more quietly the worse, internecine war with Quacks high and
low.  My good Brother, who was with me out of Italy in summer,
declared himself shocked, and almost terror-struck:  "Jack," I
answered, "innumerable men give their lives cheerfully to defend
Falsehoods and Half-Falsehoods;  why should not one writer give
his life cheerfully to say, in plain Scotch-English, in the
hearing of God and man, To me they seem false and half-false?  At
all events, thou seest, I cannot help it.  It is the nature of
the beast."  So that, on the whole, I suppose there is no more
unpromotable, unappointable man now living in England than I.
Literature also, the miscellaneous place of refuge, seems done
here, unless you will take the Devil's wages for it;  which one
does not incline to do.  A _disjectum membrum;_  cut off from
relations with men?  Verily so;  and now forty years of age;  and
extremely dyspeptical:  a hopeless-looking man.  Yet full of what
I call desperate-hope!  One does verily stand on the Earth, a
Star-dome encompassing one;  seemingly accoutred and enlisted and
sent to battle, with rations good, indifferent, or bad,--what can
one do but in the name of Odin, Tuisco, Hertha, Horsa, and
all Saxon and Hebrew Gods, fight it out?--This surely is very
idle talk.

As to the Book, I do say seriously that it is a wild, savage,
ruleless, very bad Book;  which even you will not be able to
like;  much less any other man.  Yet it contains strange things;
sincerities drawn out of the heart of a man very strangely
situated;  reverent of nothing but what is reverable in all ages
and places:  so we will print it, and be done with it;--and try a
new turn next time.  What I am to do, were the thing done, you
see therefore, is most uncertain.  How gladly would I run to
Concord!  And if I were there, be sure the do-nothing arrangement
is the only conceivable one for me.  That my sick existence
subside again, this is the first condition; that quiet vision be
restored me.  It is frightful what an impatience I have got for
many kinds of fellow-creatures.  Their jargon really hurts me
like the shrieking of inarticulate creatures that ought to
articulate.  There is no resource but to say:  Brother, thou
surely art not hateful;  thou art lovable, at lowest pitiable;--
alas! in my case, thou art dreadfully wearisome, unedifying:  go
thy ways, with my blessing.  There are hardly three people among
these two millions, whom I care much to exchange words with, in
the humor I have.  Nevertheless, at bottom, it is not my purpose
to quit London finally till I have as it were _seen it out._  In
the very hugeness of the monstrous City, contradiction cancelling
contradiction, one finds a sort of composure for one's self that
is not to be met with elsewhere perhaps in the world:  people
tolerate you, were it only that they have not time to trouble
themselves with you.  Some individuals even love me here;  there
are one or two whom I have even learned to love,--though, for the
present, cross circumstances have snatched them out of my orbit
again mostly.  Wherefore, if you ask me, What I am to do?--the
answer is clear so far, "Rest myself awhile";  and all farther is
as dark as Chaos.  Now for resting, taking that by itself, my
Brother, who has gone back to Rome with some thoughts of settling
as a Physician there, presses me to come thither, and rest in
Rome.  On the other hand, a certain John Sterling (the best man I
have found in these regions) has been driven to Bordeaux lately
for his health;  he will have it that I must come to him, and
walk through the South of France to Dauphine, Avignon, and over
the Alps next spring!*  Thirdly, my Mother will have me return to
Annandale, and lie quiet in her little habitation;--which I
incline to think were the wisest course of all.  And lastly from
over the Atlantic comes my good Emerson's voice.  We will settle
nothing, except that all shall remain unsettled.  _Die Zukunft
decket Schmerzen and Glucke._

------------
* In his _Life of Sterling,_ Carlyle prints a letter from
Sterling to himself, dated Bordeaux, October 26, 1836, in which
Sterling urges him to come "in the first fine days of spring."
It must have reached him a few days before he wrote this letter
to Emerson.
---------

I ought to say, however, that about New-year's-day I will send
you an Article on _Mirabeau,_ which they have printed here (for a
thing called the _London Review_), and some kind of Note to
escort it.  I think Pamphlets travel as Letters in New England,
provided you leave the ends of them open:  if I be mistaken, pray
instruct Messrs. Barnard to _refuse_ the thing, for it has small
value.  _The Diamond Necklace_ is to be printed also, in
_Fraser;_  inconceivable hawking that poor Paper has had;  till
now Fraser takes it--for L50:  not being able to get it for
nothing.  The _Mirabeau_ was written at the passionate request of
John Mill;  and likewise for needful lucre.  I think it is the
first shilling of money I have earned by my craft these four
years:  where the money I have lived on has come from while I sat
here scribbling gratis, amazes me to think;  yet surely it has
come (for I am still here), and Heaven only to thank for it,
which is a great fact.  As for Mill's _London Review_ (for he is
quasi-editor), I do not recommend it to you.  Hide-bound
Radicalism;  a to me well-nigh insupportable thing!  Open it not:
a breath as of Sahara and the Infinite Sterile comes from every
page of it.  A young Radical Baronet* has laid out L3,000 on
getting the world instructed in that manner:  it is very curious
to see.--Alas! the bottom of the sheet!  Take my hurried but
kindest thanks for the prospect of your second Teufelsdrockh:
the _first_ too is now in my possession;  Brother John went to
the Post-Office, and worked it out for a ten shillings.  It is
a beautiful little Book;  and a Preface to it such as no kindest
friend could have improved.  Thank my kind Editor** very heartily
from me.

---------
* Sir William Molesworth.  In his _Autobiography_ Mill gives an
interesting account of the founding of this _Review,_ and his
quasi-editorial relations to it.  "In the beginning," he says,
"it did not, as a whole, by any means represent my opinion."

** Dr. Le-Baron Russell
---------

My wife was in Scotland in summer, driven thither by ill health;
she is stronger since her return, though not yet strong;  she
sends over to Concord her kindest wishes.  If I fly to the Alps
or the Ocean, her Mother and she must keep one another company,
we think, till there be better news of me.  You are to thank Dr.
Channing also for his valued gift.  I read the Discourse, and
other friends of his read it, with great estimation;  but the
_end_ of that black question lies beyond my ken.  I suppose, as
usual, Might and Right will have to make themselves synonymous in
some way.  CANST and SHALT, if they are _very_ well understood,
mean the same thing under this Sun of ours.  Adieu, my dear
Emerson.  _Gehab' Dich wohl!_  Many affectionate regards to the
Lady Wife:  it is far within the verge of Probabilities that I
shall see her face, and eat of her bread, one day.  But she must
not get sick!  It is a dreadful thing, sickness;  really a thing
which I begin frequently to think _criminal_--at least in myself.
Nay, in myself it really is criminal;  wherefore I determine to
be well one day.

Good be with you and Yours.
                      T. Carlyle

As to Goethe and your Friend:  I know not anything out of
Goethe's own works (which have many notices in them) that treats
specially of those ten years.  Doubtless your Friend knows
Jordens's _Lexicon_ (which dates all the writings, for one
thing), the _Conversations-Lexicon Supplement,_ and such like.
There is an essay by one Schubarth which has reputation;  but it
is critical and ethical mainly.  The Letters to Zelter, and the
Letters to Schiller, will do nothing for those years, but
are essential to see.  Perhaps in some late number of the
_Zeitgenossen_ there may be something?  Blackguard Heine is worth
very little;  Mentzel is duller, decenter, not much wiser.  A
very curious Book is Eckermann's _Conversations with Goethe,_
just published.  No room more!*

-----------
* Concerning this letter Emerson wrote in his Diary:  "January 7,
1837.  Received day before yesterday a letter from Thomas
Carlyle, dated 5 November;--as ever, a cordial influence.  Strong
he is, upright, noble, and sweet, and makes good how much of our
human nature.  Quite in consonance with my delight in his
eloquent letters I read in Bacon this afternoon this sentence (of
Letters):  'And such as are written from wise men are of all the
words of men, in my judgment, the best;  for they are more
natural than orations, public speeches, and more advised than
conferences or present speeches.'"
-------------




XIV. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London, 13 February, 1837

My Dear Emerson,--You had promise of a letter to be despatched
you about New-year's-day;  which promise I was myself in a
condition to fulfil at the time set, but delayed it, owing to
delays of printers and certain "Articles" that were to go with
it.  Six weeks have not yet entirely brought up these laggard
animals:  however, I will delay no longer for them.  Nay, it
seems the Articles, were they never so ready, cannot go with the
Letter;  but must fare round by Liverpool or Portsmouth, in a
separate conveyance.  We will leave them to the bounty of Time.

Your little Book and the Copy of _Teufelsdrockh_ came safely;
soon after I had written.  The _Teufelsdrockh_ I instantaneously
despatched to Hamburg, to a Scottish merchant there, to whom
there is an allusion in the Book;  who used to be my _Speditor_
(one of the politest extant though totally a stranger) in my
missions and packages to and from Weimar.*  The other, former
Copy, more specially yours, had already been, as I think I told
you, delivered out of durance;  and got itself placed in the
bookshelf, as _the_ Teufelsdrockh.  George Ripley tells me you
are printing another edition;  much good may it do you!  There is
now also a kind of whisper and whimper rising _here_ about
printing one.  I said to myself once, when Bookseller Fraser
shrieked so loud at a certain message you sent him:  "Perhaps
after all they will print this poor rag of a thing into a Book,
after I am dead it may be,--if so seem good to them.  _Either_
way!"  As it is, we leave the poor orphan to its destiny, all the
more cheerfully.  Ripley says farther he has sent me a critique
of it by a better hand than the _North American:_  I expect it,
but have not got it Yet.**  The _North American_ seems to say
that he too sent me one.  It never came to hand, nor any hint of
it,--except I think once before through you.  It was not at all
an unfriendly review;  but had an opacity, of matter-of-fact in
it that filled one with amazement.  Since the Irish Bishop who
said there were some things in _Gulliver_ on which he for one
would keep his belief _suspended,_ nothing equal to it, on that
side, has come athwart me.  However, he _has_ made out that
Teufelsdrockh is, in all human probability, a fictitious
character;  which is always something, for an Inquirer into
Truth.--Will you, finally, thank Friend Ripley in my name, till I
have time to write to him and thank him.

-----------
* The allusion referred to is the following:  "By the kindness of
a Scottish Hamburg merchant, whose name, known to the whole
mercantile world, he must not mention;  but whose honorable
courtesy, now and before spontaneously manifested to him, a mere
literary stranger, he cannot soon forget,--the bulky Weissnichtwo
packet, with all its Custom-house seals, foreign hieroglyphs, and
miscellaneous tokens of travel, arrived here in perfect safety,
and free of cost."--_Sartor Resartus,_ Book I. ch. xi.

** An article by the Rev. N.L. Frothingham in the _Christian
Examiner._
----------

Your little azure-colored Nature gave me true satisfaction.  I
read it, and then lent it about to all my acquaintance that had a
sense for such things;  from whom a similar verdict always came
back.  You say it is the first chapter of something greater.  I
call it rather the Foundation and Ground-plan on which you may
build whatsoever of great and true has been given you to build.
It is the true Apocalypse, this when the "Open Secret" becomes
revealed to a man.  I rejoice much in the glad serenity of soul
with which you look out on this wondrous Dwelling-place of yours
and mine--with an ear for the _Ewigen Melodien,_ which pipe in
the winds round us, and utter themselves forth in all sounds and
sights and things:  not to be written down by gamut-machinery;
but which all right writing is a kind of attempt to write down.
You will see what the years will bring you.  It is not one of
your smallest qualities in my mind, that you can wait so quietly
and let the years do their best.  He that cannot keep himself
quiet is of a morbid nature;  and the thing he yields us will be
like him in that, whatever else it be.

Miss Martineau (for I have seen her since I wrote) tells me you
"are the only man in America" who has quietly set himself down on
a competency to follow his own path, and do the work his own will
prescribes for him.  Pity that you were the only one!  But be
one, nevertheless;  be the first, and there will come a second
and a third.  It is a poor country where all men are _sold_ to
Mammon, and can make nothing but Railways and Bursts of
Parliamentary Eloquence!  And yet your New England here too has
the upper hand of our Old England, of our Old Europe:  we too are
sold to Mammon, soul, body, and spirit;  but (mark that, I pray
you, with double pity) Mammon will not _pay_ us,--we, are "Two
Million three hundred thousand in Ireland that have not potatoes
enough"!  I declare, in History I find nothing more tragical.  I
find also that it will alter;  that for me as one it has altered.
Me Mammon will _pay_ or not as he finds convenient;  buy me he
will not.--In fine, I say, sit still at Concord, with such spirit
as you are of;  under the blessed skyey influences, with an open
sense, with the great Book of Existence open round you:  we shall
see whether you too get not something blessed to read us from it.

The Paper is declining fast, and all is yet speculation.  Along
with these two "Articles" (to be sent by Liverpool;  there are
two of them, _Diamond Necklace_ and _Mirabeau_), you will very
probably get some stray Proofsheet--of the unutterable _French
Revolution!_  It is actually at Press;  two Printers working at
separate Volumes of it,--though still too slow.  In not many
weeks, my hands will be washed of it!  You, I hope, can have
little conception of the feeling with which I wrote the last word
of it, one night in early January, when the clock was striking
ten, and our frugal Scotch supper coming in!  I did not cry;  nor
I did not pray but could have done both.  No such _spell_ shall
get itself fixed on me for some while to come!  A beggarly
Distortion;  that will please no mortal, not even myself;  of
which I know not whether the fire were not after all the due
place!  And yet I ought not to say so:  there is a great blessing
in a man's doing what he utterly can, in the case he is in.
Perhaps great quantities of dross are burnt out of me by this
calcination I have had;  perhaps I shall be far quieter and
healthier of mind and body than I have ever been since boyhood.
The world, though no man had ever less empire in it, seems to me
a thing lying _under_ my feet;  a mean imbroglio, which I never
more shall fear, or court, or disturb myself with:  welcome and
welcome to go wholly _its own way;_  I wholly clear for going
mine.  Through the summer months I am, somewhere or other, to
rest myself, in the deepest possible sleep.  The residue is vague
as the wind,--unheeded as the wind.  Some way it will turn out
that a poor, well-meaning Son of Adam has bread growing for him
too, better or worse:  _any_ way,--or even _no_ way, if that be
it,--I shall be content.  There is a scheme here among Friends
for my Lecturing in a thing they call Royal Institution;  but it
will not do there, I think.  The instant two or three are
gathered together under any terms, who want to learn something I
can teach them,--then we will, most readily, as Burns says,
"loose our tinkler jaw";  but not I think till then;  were the
Institution even Imperial.

America has faded considerably into the background of late:
indeed, to say truth, whenever I think of myself in America, it
is as in the Backwoods, with a rifle in my hand, God's sky over
my head, and this accursed Lazar-house of quacks and blockheads,
'and sin and misery (now near a head) lying all behind me
forevermore.  A thing, you see, which is and can be at bottom but
a daydream!  To rest through the summer:  that is my only fixed
wisdom;  a resolution taken;  only the place where uncertain.--
What a pity this poor sheet is done!  I had innumerable things to
tell you about people whom I have seen, about books,--Miss
Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Butler, Southey, Influenza, Parliament,
Literature and the Life of Man,--the whole of which must lie over
till next time.  Write to me;  do not forget me.  My Wife, who is
sitting by me, in very poor health (this long while), sends
"kindest remembrances," "compliments" she expressly does not
send.  Good be with you always, my dear Friend!

                            --T. Carlyle

We send our felicitation to the Mother and little Boy;  which
latter you had better tell us the name of.




XV. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, Mass., 31 March, 1837

My Dear Friend,--Last night, I said I would write to you
forthwith.  This morning I received your letter of February 13th,
and _with it_ the _Diamond Necklace,_ the _Mirabeau,_ and the
olive leaf of a proof-sheet.  I write out the sum of my debt as
the best acknowledgment I can make.  I had already received,
about New-Year's-Day, the preceding letter.  It came in the midst
of my washbowl-storm of a course of Lectures on the Philosophy of
History.  For all these gifts and pledges,--thanks.  Over the
finished _History,_ joy and evergreen laurels.  I embrace you
with all my heart.  I solace myself with the noble nature God has
given you, and in you to me, and to all.  I had read the _Diamond
Necklace_ three weeks ago at the Boston Athenaeum, and the
_Mirabeau_ I had just read when my copy came.  But the proof-sheet
was virgin gold.  The _Mirabeau_ I forebode is to establish your
kingdom in England.  That is genuine thunder, which nobody that
wears ears can affect to mistake for the rumbling of cart-wheels.
I please myself with thinking that my Angelo has blocked
a Colossus which may stand in the public square to defy all
competitors.  To be sure, that is its least merit,--that nobody
can do the like,--yet is it a gag to Cerberus.  Its better merit
is that it inspires self-trust, by teaching the immense resources
that are in human nature;  so I sent it to be read by a brave man
who is poor and decried.  The doctrine is indeed true and grand
which you preach as by cannonade, that God made a man, and it
were as well to stand by and see what is in him, and, if he act
ever from his impulses, believe that he has his own checks, and,
however extravagant, will keep his orbit, and return from far;  a
faith that draws confirmation from the sempiternal ignorance and
stationariness of society, and the sempiternal growth of all
the individuals.

The _Diamond Necklace_ I read with joy, whilst I read with my own
eyes.  When I read with English or New-English eyes, my joy is
marred by the roaring of the opposition.  I doubt not the exact
story is there told as it fell out, and told for the first time;
but the eye of your readers, as you will easily guess, will be
bewildered by the multitude of brilliant-colored hieroglyphics
whereby the meaning is conveyed.  And for the Gig,--the Gig,--it
is fairly worn out, and such a cloud-compeller must mock that
particular symbol no more.

I thought as I read this piece that your strange genius was the
instant fruit of your London.  It is the aroma of Babylon.  Such
as the great metropolis, such is this style:  so vast, enormous,
related to all the world, and so endless in details.  I think you
see as pictures every street, church, parliament-house, barrack,
baker's shop, mutton-stall, forge, wharf, and ship, and whatever
stands, creeps, rolls, or swims thereabouts, and make all your
own.  Hence your encyclopediacal allusion to all knowables, and
the virtues and vices of your panoramic pages.  Well, it is your
own;  and it is English;  and every word stands for somewhat;
and it cheers and fortifies me.  And what more can a man ask of
his writing fellow-man?  Why, all things;  inasmuch as a good
mind creates wants at every stroke.

The proof-sheet rhymes well with _Mirabeau,_ and has abated my
fears from your own and your brother's account of the new book.
I greet it well.  Auspicious Babe, be born!  The first good of
the book is that it makes you free, and as I anxiously hope makes
your body sound.  A possible good is that it will cause me to see
your face.  But I seemed to read in _Mirabeau_ what you intimate
in your letter, that you will not come westward.  Old England is
to find you out, and then the New will have no charm.  For me it
will be the worst;  for you, not.  A man, a few men, cannot be to
you (with your ministering eyes) that which you should travel far
to find.  Moreover, I observe that America looks, to those who
come hither, as unromantic and unexciting as the Dutch canals.  I
see plainly that our Society, for the most part, is as bigoted to
the _respectabilities_ of religion and education as yours;  that
there is no more appetite for a revelation here than elsewhere;
and the educated class are, of course, less fair-minded than
others.  Yet, in the moments when my eyes are open, I see that
here are rich materials for the philosopher and poet, and, what
is more to your purpose as an artist, that we have had in these
parts no one philosopher or poet to put a sickle to the prairie
wheat.  I have really never believed that you would do us that
crowning grace of coming hither, yet if God should be kinder to
us than our belief, I meant and mean to hold you fast in my
little meadows on the Musketaquid (now Concord) River, and show
you (as in this country we can anywhere) an America in miniature
in the April or November town meeting.  Therein should you
conveniently study and master the whole of our hemispherical
politics reduced to a nutshell, and have a new version of
Oxenstiern's little wit;  and yet be consoled by seeing that here
the farmers patient as their bulls of head-boards--provided for
them in relation to distant national objects, by kind editors of
newspapers--do yet their will, and a good will, in their own
parish.  If a wise man would pass by New York, and be content to
sit still in this village a few months, he should get a thorough
native knowledge which no foreigner has yet acquired.  So I leave
you with God, and if any oracle in the great Delphos should say
"Go," why fly to us instantly.  Come and spend a year with me,
and see if I cannot respect your retirements.

I must love you for your interest in me and my way of life, and
the more that we only look for good-nature in the creative class.
They pay the tag of grandeur, and, attracted irresistibly to
make, their living is usually weak and hapless.  But you are so
companionable--God has made you Man as well as Poet--that I
lament the three thousand miles of mountainous water.  Burns
might have added a better verse to his poem, importing that one
might write Iliads or Hamlets, and yet come short of Truth by
infinity, as every written word must;  but "the man's the gowd
for a' that."  And I heartily thank the Lady for her good-will.
Please God she may be already well.  We all grieve to know of her
ill health.  People who have seen her never stop with _Mr._
Carlyle, but count him thrice blest in her.  My wife believes in
nothing for her but the American voyage.  I shall never cease to
expect you both until you come.

My boy is five months old, he is called Waldo,--a lovely wonder
that made the Universe look friendlier to me.

My Wife, one of your best lovers, sends her affectionate regards
to Mrs. Carlyle, and says that she takes exception in your
letters only to that sentence that she would go to Scotland if
you came here.  My Wife beseeches her to come and possess her
new-dressed chamber.  Do not cease to write whenever you can
spare me an hour.  A man named Bronson Alcott is great, and one
of the jewels we have to show you.  Good bye.

                           --R.W. Emerson

The second edition of _Sartor_ is out and sells well.  I
learned the other day that twenty-five copies of it were ordered
for England.  It was very amiable of you, that word about it
in _Mirabeau._*

----------
* This refers to Carlyle's introducing, in his paper on
_Mirabeau,_ a citation from _Sartor,_ with the words, "We quote
from a New England Book."
----------




XVI. Carlyle to Emerson

5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, London, 1 June, 1857

My Dear Friend,--A word must go to Concord in answer to your last
kind word.  It reached me, that word of yours, on the morning of
a most unspeakable day;  the day when I, half dead with fret,
agitation, and exasperation, was to address extempore an audience
of London quality people on the subject of German Literature!
The heart's wish of me was that I might be left in deepest
oblivion, wrapped in blankets and silence, not speaking, not
spoken to, for a twelvemonth to come.  My Printers had only let
me go, out of their Treadmill, the day before.  However, all that
is over now;  and I am still here alive to write to you, and hope
for better days.

Almost a month ago there went a copy of a Book called _French
Revolution,_ with your address on it, over to Red-Lion Square,
and thence, as old Rich declared, himself now _emeritus,_ back to
one Kennet (I think) near Covent Garden;  who professes to
correspond with Hilliard and Company, Boston, and undertook the
service.  The Book is not gone yet, I understand;  but Kennet
engages that it shall leave Liverpool infallibly on the 5th of
June.  I wish you a happy reading of it, therefore:  it is the
only copy of my sending that has crossed the water.  Ill printed
(there are many errors, one or two gross ones), ill written, ill
thought!  But in fine it _is_ off my hands:  that is a fact worth
all others.  As to its reception here or elsewhere, I anticipate
nothing or little.  Gabble, gabble, the astonishment of the dull
public brain is likely to be considerable, and its ejaculations
unedifying.  We will let it go its way.  Beat this thing, I say
always, under thy dull hoofs, O dull Public! trample it and
tumble it into all sinks and kennels;  if thou canst kill it,
kill it in God's name:  if thou canst not kill it, why then thou
wilt not.

By the by, speaking of dull Publics, I ought to say that I have
seen a review of myself in the _Christian Examiner_ (I think that
is it) of Boston;  the author of which, if you know him, I desire
you to thank on my part.  For if a dull million is good, then
withal a seeing unit or two is also good.  This man images back a
beautiful idealized Clothes-Philosopher, very satisfactory to
look upon;  in whose beatified features I did verily detect more
similitude to what I myself meant to be, than in any or all the
other criticisms I have yet seen written of me.  That a man see
himself reflected from the soul of his brother-man in this
brotherly improved way:  there surely is one of the most
legitimate joys of existence.  Friend Ripley took the trouble to
send me this Review, in which I detected an Article of his own;
there came also some Discourses of his much to be approved of;  a
Newspaper passage-of-fence with a Philistine of yours;  and a set
of Essays on Progress-of-the-species and such like by a man whom
I grieved to see confusing himself with that.  Progress of the
species is a thing I can get no good of at all.  These Books,
which Miss Martineau has borrowed from me, did not arrive till
three weeks ago or less.  I pray you to thank Ripley for them
very kindly;  which at present I still have not time to do.  He
seems to me a good man, with good aims;  with considerable
natural health of mind, wherein all goodness is likely to grow
better, all clearness to grow clearer.  Miss Martineau laments
that he does not fling himself, or not with the due impetuosity,
into the Black Controversy;  a thing lamentable in the extreme,
when one considers what a world this is, and how perfect it would
be could Mungo once get his stupid case rectified, and eat his
squash as a stupid _Apprentice_ instead of stupid _Slave!_

Miss Martineau's Book on America is out, here and with you.  I
have read it for the good Authoress's sake, whom I love much.
She is one of the strangest phenomena to me.  A genuine little
Poetess, buckramed, swathed like a mummy into Socinian and
Political-Economy formulas;  and yet verily alive in the inside
of that!  "God has given a Prophet to every People in its own
speech," say the Arabs.  Even the English Unitarians were one day
to have their Poet, and the best that could be said for them too
was to be said.  I admire this good lady's integrity, sincerity;
her quick, sharp discernment to the depth it goes:  her love
also is great;  nay, in fact it is too great:  the host of
illustrious obscure mortals whom she produces on you, of
Preachers, Pamphleteers, Antislavers, Able Editors, and other
Atlases bearing (unknown to us) the world on their shoulder, is
absolutely more than enough.  What they say to her Book here I do
not well know.  I fancy the general reception will be good, and
even brilliant.  I saw Mrs. Butler* last night, "in an ocean of
blonde and broadcloth," one of those oceans common at present.
Ach Gott!  They are not of Persons, these soirdes, but of
Cloth Figures.

----------
* Mrs Fanny Kemble Butler.
----------

I mean to retreat into Scotland very soon, to repose myself as I
intended.  My Wife continues here with her Mother;  here at least
till the weather grow too hot, or a journey to join me seem
otherwise advisable for her.  She is gathering strength, but
continues still weak enough.  I rest myself "on the sunny side of
hedges" in native Annandale, one of the obscurest regions;  no
man shall speak to me, I will speak to no man;  but have
dialogues yonder with the old dumb crags, of the most
unfathomable sort.  Once rested, I think of returning to London
for another season.  Several things are beginning which I ought
to see end before taking up my staff again.  In this enormous
Chaos the very multitude of conflicting perversions produces
something more like a _calm_ than you can elsewhere meet with.
Men let you alone, which is an immense thing:  they do it even
because they have no time to meddle with you.  London, or else
the Backwoods of America, or Craigenputtock!  We shall see.

I still beg the comfort of hearing from you.  I am sick of soul
and body, but not incurable;  the loving word of a Waldo Emerson
is as balm to me, medicinal now more than ever.  My Wife
earnestly joins me in love to the Concord Household.  May a
blessing be in it, on one and all!  I do nowise give up the idea
of sojourning there one time yet.  On the contrary, it seems
almost certain that I shall.  Good be with you.

Yours always,
            T. Carlyle*

-----------
* Emerson wrote in his Diary, July 27, 1837:  "A letter today
from Carlyle rejoiced me.  Pleasant would life be with such
companions.  But if you cannot have them on good mutual terms you
cannot have them.  If not the Deity but our wilfulness hews and
shapes the new relations, their sweetness escapes, as
strawberries lose their flavor by cultivation."
----------




XVII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 13 September, 1837

My Dear Friend,--Such a gift as the _French Revolution_ demanded
a speedier acknowledgment.  But you mountaineers that can scale
Andes before breakfast for an airing have no measures for the
performance of lowlanders and valetudinarians.  I am ashamed to
think, and will not tell, what little things have kept me silent.

The _French Revolution_ did not reach me until three weeks ago,
having had at least two long pauses by the way, as I find, since
landing.  Between many visits received, and some literary
haranguing done, I have read two volumes and half the third and I
think you a very good giant;  disporting yourself with an
original and vast ambition of fun:  pleasure and peace not being
strong enough for you, you choose to suck pain also, and teach
fever and famine to dance and sing.  I think you have written a
wonderful book, which will last a very long time.  I see that you
have created a history, which the world will own to be such.  You
have recognized the existence of other persons than officers, and
of other relations than civism.  You have broken away from all
books, and written a mind.  It is a brave experiment, and the
success is great.  We have men in your story and not names
merely;  always men, though I may doubt sometimes whether I have
the historic men.  We have great facts--and selected facts--truly
set down.  We have always the co-presence of Humanity along with
the imperfect damaged individuals.  The soul's right of wonder is
still left to us;  and we have righteous praise and doom awarded,
assuredly without cant.  Yes, comfort yourself on that
particular, O ungodliest divine man! thou cantest never.  Finally
we have not--a dull word.  Never was there a style so rapid as
yours,--which no reader can outrun;  and so it is for the most
intelligent.  I suppose nothing will astonish more than the
audacious wit and cheerfulness which no tragedy and no magnitude
of events can overpower or daunt.  Henry VIII loved a Man, and I
see with joy my bard always equal to the crisis he represents.
And so I thank you for your labor, and feel that your
contemporaries ought to say, All hail, Brother! live forever:
not only in the great Soul which thou largely inhalest, but also
as a named, person in this thy definite deed.

I will tell you more of the book when I have once got it at focal
distance,--if that can ever be, and muster my objections when I
am sure of their ground.  I insist, of course, that it might be
more simple, less Gothically efflorescent.  You will say no rules
for the illumination of windows can apply to the Aurora borealis.
However, I find refreshment when every now and then a special
fact slips into the narrative couched in sharp and businesslike
terms.  This character-drawing in the book is certainly
admirable;  the lines are ploughed furrows;  but there was cake
and ale before, though thou be virtuous.  Clarendon surely drew
sharp outlines for me in Falkland, Hampden, and the rest, without
defiance or sky-vaulting.  I wish I could talk with you face to
face for one day, and know what your uttermost frankness would
say concerning the book.  I feel assured of its good reception in
this country.  I learned last Saturday that in all eleven hundred
and sixty-six copies of _Sartor_ have been sold.  I have told the
publisher of that book that he must not print the _History_ until
some space has been given to people to import British copies.  I
have ordered Hilliard, Gray, & Co. to import twenty copies as an
experiment.  At the present very high rate of exchange, which
makes a shilling worth thirty cents, they think, with freight and
duties, the book would be too costly here for sale, but we
confide in a speedy fall of Exchange;  then my books shall come.
I am ashamed that you should educate our young men, and that we
should pirate your books.  One day we will have a better law, or
perhaps you will make our law yours.

I had your letter long before your book.  Very good work you have
done in your lifetime, and very generously you adorn and cheer
this pilgrimage of mine by your love.  I find my highest prayer
granted in calling a just and wise man my friend.  Your profuse
benefaction of genius in so few years makes me feel very poor and
useless.  I see that I must go on trust to you and to all the
brave for some longer time, hoping yet to prove one day my truth
and love.  There are in this country so few scholars, that the
services of each studious person are needed to do what he can
for the circulation of thoughts, to the end of making some
counterweight to the money force, and to give such food as he may
to the nigh starving youth.  So I religiously read lectures every
winter, and at other times whenever summoned.  Last year, "the
Philosophy of History," twelve lectures;  and now I meditate a
course on what I call "Ethics."  I peddle out all the wit I can
gather from Time or from Nature, and am pained at heart to see
how thankfully that little is received.

Write to me, good friend, tell me if you went to Scotland,--what
you do, and will do,--tell me that your wife is strong and well
again as when I saw her at Craigenputtock.  I desire to be
affectionately remembered to her.  Tell me when you will come
hither.  I called together a little club a week ago, who spent a
day with me,--counting fifteen souls,--each one of whom warmly
loves you.  So if the _French Revolution_ does not convert the
"dull public" of your native Nineveh, I see not but you must
shake their dust from your shoes and cross the Atlantic to a New
England.  Yours in love and honor.

                                              --R. Waldo Emerson

May I trouble you with a commission when you are in the City?
You mention being at the shop of Rich in Red-Lion Square.  Will
you say to him that he sent me some books two or three years ago
without any account of prices annexed?  I wrote him once myself,
once through S. Burdett, bookseller, and since through C.P.
Curtis, Esq., who professes to be his attorney in Boston,--three
times,--to ask for this account.  No answer has ever come.  I
wish he would send me the account, that I may settle it.  If he
persist in his self-denying contumacy, I think you may
immortalize him as a bookseller of the gods.

I shall send you an Oration presently, delivered before a
literary society here, which is now being printed.*  Gladly I
hear of the Carlylet--so they say--in the new Westminster.

---------
* This was Emerson's famous Oration before the Phi Beta Kappa
Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837, on "The American
Scholar."  In his admirable essay on Thoreau,--an essay which
might serve as introduction and comment to the letters of Carlyle
and Emerson during these years,--Lowell speaks of the impression
made by this remarkable discourse.  It  "was an event without any
former parallel in our literary annals, a scene to be always
treasured in the memory for its picturesqueness and its
inspiration.  What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows
clustering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, what
grim silence of foregone dissent!  It was our Yankee version of a
lecture by Abelard, our Harvard parallel to the last public
appearances of Schelling."--_My Study Windows,_ p. 197
---------




XVIII. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 2 November, 1837

My Dear Friend,--Mr. Charles Sumner, a lawyer of high standing
for his age, and editor or one editor of a journal called _The
Jurist,_ and withal a lover of your writings, tells me he is
going to Paris and thence to London, and sets out in a few days.
I cannot, of course, resist his request for a letter to you, nor
let pass the occasion of a greeting.  Health, Joy, and Peace be
with you!  I hope you sit still yet, and do not hastily meditate
new labors.  Phidias need not be always tinkering.  Sit still
like an Egyptian.  Somebody told me the other day that your
friends here might have made a sum for the author by publishing
_Sartor_ themselves, instead of leaving it with a bookseller.
Instantly I wondered why I had never such a thought before, and
went straight to Boston, and have made a bargain with a
bookseller to print the _French Revolution._  It is to be printed
in two volumes of the size of our American _Sartor,_ one thousand
copies, the estimate making the cost of the book say (in dollars
and cents) $1.18 a copy, and the price $2.50.  The bookseller
contracts with me to sell the book at a commission of twenty
percent on that selling price, allowing me however to take at
cost as many copies as I can find subscribers for.  There is yet,
I believe, no other copy in the country than mine:  so I gave him
the first volume, and the printing is begun.  I shall take
care that your friends here shall know my contract with the
bookseller, and so shall give me their names.  Then, if so good a
book can have a tolerable sale, (almost contrary to the nature of
a good book, I know,) I shall sustain with great glee the new
relation of being your banker and attorney.  They have had the
wit in the London _Examiner,_ I find, to praise at last;  and I
mean that our public shall have the entire benefit of that page.
The _Westminster_ they can read themselves.  The printers think
they can get the book out by Christmas.  So it must be long
before I can tell you what cheer.  Meantime do you tell me, I
entreat you, what speed it has had at home.  The best, I hope,
with the wise and good withal.

I have nothing to tell you and no thoughts.  I have promised a
course of Lectures for December, and am far from knowing what I
am to say;  but the way to make sure of fighting into the new
continent is to burn your ships.  The "tender ears," as George
Fox said, of young men are always an effectual call to me
ignorant to speak.  I find myself so much more and freer on the
platform of the lecture-room than in the pulpit, that I shall not
much more use the last;  and do now only in a little country
chapel at the request of simple men to whom I sustain no other
relation than that of preacher.  But I preach in the Lecture-Room
and then it tells, for there is no prescription.  You may laugh,
weep, reason, sing, sneer, or pray, according to your genius.  It
is the new pulpit, and very much in vogue with my northern
countrymen.  This winter, in Boston, we shall have more than
ever:  two or three every night of the week.  When will you come
and redeem your pledge?  The day before yesterday my little boy
was a year old,--no, the day before that,--and I cannot tell you
what delight and what study I find in this little bud of God,
which I heartily desire you also should see.  Good, wise, kind
friend, I shall see you one day.  Let me hear, when you can
write, that Mrs. Carlyle is well again.

                               --R. Waldo Emerson




XIX. Carlyle to Emerson

Chelsea, London, 8 December, 1837

My Dear Emerson,--How long it is since you last heard of me I do
not very accurately know;    but it is too long.  A very long,
ugly, inert, and unproductive chapter of my own history seems to
have passed since then.  Whenever I delay writing, be sure
matters go not well with me;  and do you in that case write to
me, were it again and over again,--unweariable in pity.

I did go to Scotland, for almost three months;  leaving my Wife
here with her Mother.  The poor Wife had fallen so weak that she
gave me real terror in the spring-time, and made the Doctor look
very grave indeed:  she continued too weak for traveling:  I was
worn out as I had never in my life been.  So, on the longest day
of June, I got back to my Mother's cottage;  threw myself down, I
may say, into what we may call the "frightfulest _magnetic
sleep,_" and lay there avoiding the intercourse of men.  Most
wearisome had their gabble become;  almost unearthly.  But indeed
all was unearthly in that humor.  The gushing of my native
brooks, the _sough_ of the old solitary woods, the great roar of
old native Solway (billowing fresh out of your Atlantic, drawn by
the Moon):  all this was a kind of unearthly music to me;  I
cannot tell you how unearthly.  It did not bring me to rest;  yet
_towards_ rest I do think at all events, the time had come when I
behoved to quit it again.  I have been here since September
evidently another little "chapter" or paragraph, _not_ altogether
inert, is getting forward.  But I must not speak of these things.
How can I speak of them on a miserable scrap of blue paper?
Looking into your kind-eyes with my eyes, I could speak:  not
here.  Pity me, my friend, my brother;  yet hope well of me:  if
I can (in all senses) _rightly hold my peace,_ I think much will
yet be well with me.  SILENCE is the great thing I worship at
present;  almost the sole tenant of my Pantheon.  Let a man know
rightly how to hold his peace.  I love to repeat to myself,
"Silence is of Eternity."  Ah me, I think how I could rejoice to
quit these jarring discords and jargonings of Babel, and go far,
far away!  I do believe, if I had the smallest competence of
money to get "food and warmth" with, I would shake the mud of
London from my feet, and go and bury myself in some green place,
and never print any syllable more.  Perhaps it is better as
it is.

But quitting this, we will actually speak (under favor of
"Silence") one very small thing;  a pleasant piece of news.
There is a man here called John Sterling (_Reverend_ John of the
Church of England too), whom I love better than anybody I have
met with, since a certain sky-messenger alighted to me at
Craigenputtock, and vanished in the Blue again.  This Sterling
has written;  but what is far better, he has lived, he is alive.
Across several unsuitable wrappages, of Church-of-Englandism and
others, my heart loves the man.  He is one, and the best, of a
small class extant here, who, nigh drowning in a black wreck of
Infidelity (lighted up by some glare of Radicalism only, now
growing _dim_ too) and about to perish, saved themselves into a
Coleridgian Shovel-hattedness, or determination to _preach,_ to
preach peace, were it only the spent _echo_ of a peace once
preached.  He is still only about thirty;  young;  and I think
will shed the shovel-hat yet perhaps.  Do you ever read
_Blackwood?_  This John Sterling is the "New Contributor" whom
Wilson makes such a rout about, in the November and prior month
"Crystals from a Cavern," &c., which it is well worth your while
to see.  Well, and what then, cry you?--Why then, this John
Sterling has fallen overhead in love with a certain Waldo
Emerson;  that is all.  He saw the little Book _Nature_ lying
here;  and, across a whole _silva silvarum_ of prejudices,
discerned what was in it;  took it to his heart,--and indeed into
his pocket;  and has carried it off to Madeira with him;  whither
unhappily (though now with good hope and expectation) the Doctors
have ordered him.  This is the small piece of pleasant news, that
two sky-messengers (such they were both of them to me) have met
and recognized each other;  and by God's blessing there shall one
day be a trio of us:  call you that nothing?

And so now by a direct transition I am got to the _Oration._  My
friend! you know not what you have done for me there.  It was
long decades of years that I had heard nothing but the infinite
jangling and jabbering, and inarticulate twittering and
screeching, and my soul had sunk down sorrowful, and said there
is no articulate speaking then any more, and thou art solitary
among stranger-creatures? and lo, out of the West comes a clear
utterance, clearly recognizable as a _man's_ voice, and I _have_
a kinsman and brother:  God be thanked for it!  I could have
_wept_ to read that speech;  the clear high melody of it went
tingling through my heart;--I said to my wife, "There, woman!"
She read;  and returned, and charges me to return for answer,
"that there had been nothing met with like it since Schiller went
silent."  My brave Emerson!  And all this has been lying silent,
quite tranquil in him, these seven years, and the "vociferous
platitude" dinning his ears on all sides, and he quietly
answering no word;  and a whole world of Thought has silently
built itself in these calm depths, and, the day being come, says
quite softly, as if it were a common thing, "Yes, I _am_ here
too."  Miss Martineau tells me, "Some say it is inspired, some
say it is mad."  Exactly so;  no say could be suitabler.  But for
you, my dear friend, I say and pray heartily:  May God grant you
strength;  for you have a _fearful_ work to do!  Fearful I call
it;  and yet it is great, and the greatest.  O for God's sake
_keep yourself still quiet!_  Do not hasten to write;  you cannot
be too slow about it.  Give no ear to any man's praise or
censure;  know that that is _not_ it:  on the one side is as
Heaven if you have strength to keep silent, and climb unseen;
yet on the other side, yawning always at one's right-hand and
one's left, is the frightfulest Abyss and Pandemonium!  See
Fenimore Cooper;--poor Cooper, he is _down in it;_  and had a
climbing faculty too.  Be steady, be quiet, be in no haste;  and
God speed you well!  My space is done.

And so adieu, for this time.  You must write soon again.  My copy
of the _Oration_ has never come:  how is this?  I could dispose
of a dozen well.--They say I am to lecture again in Spring, _Ay
de mi!_  The "Book" is babbled about sufficiently in several
dialects:  Fraser wants to print my scattered Reviews and Articles;
a pregnant sign.  Teufelsdrockh to precede.  The man "screamed" once
at the name of it in a very musical manner.  He shall not print a
line;  unless he give me money for it, more or less.  I have had
enough of printing for one while,--thrown into "magnetic sleep"
by it!  Farewell my brother.

                         --T. Carlyle

O. Rich, it seems, is in Spain.  His representative assured me,
some weeks since, that the Account was now sent.  There is an
Article on Sir W. Scott:  shocking;  invitissima Minerva!*

----------
*Carlyle's article on Scott published in the _London and
Westminster Review,_ No. 12.  Reprinted in his _Critical and
Miscellaneous Essays._
----------

Miss Martineau charges me to send kind remembrances to you and
your Lady:  her words were kinder than I have room for here.--Can
you not, in defect or delay of Letter, send me a Massachusetts
Newspaper?  I think it costs little or almost nothing now;  and I
shall know your hand.




XX. Emerson to Carlyle

Concord, 9 February, 1838

My Dear Friend,--It is ten days now--ten cold days--that your
last letter has kept my heart warm, and I have not been able to
write before.  I have just finished--Wednesday evening--a course
of lectures which I ambitiously baptized "Human Culture," and
read once a week to the curious in Boston.  I could write nothing
else the while, for weariness of the week's stated scribbling.
Now I am free as a wood-bird, and can take up the pen without
fretting or fear.  Your letter should, and nearly did, make me
jump for joy,--fine things about our poor speech at Cambridge,--
fine things from CARLYLE.  Scarcely could we maintain a decorous
gravity on the occasion.  And then news of a friend, who is also
Carlyle's friend.  What has life better to offer than such
tidings?  You may suppose I went directly and got me _Blackwood,_
and read the prose and the verse of John Sterling, and saw that
my man had a head and a heart, and spent an hour or two very
happily in spelling his biography out of his own hand;--a species
of palmistry in which I have a perfect reliance.  I found many
incidents grave and gay and beautiful, and have determined to
love him very much.  In this romancing of the gentle affections
we are children evermore.  We forget the age of life, the
barriers so thin yet so adamantean of space and circumstance;
and I have had the rarest poems self-singing in my head of brave
men that work and conspire in a perfect intelligence across seas
and conditions--and meet at last.  I heartily pray that the Sea
and its vineyards may cheer with warm medicinal breath a Voyager
so kind and noble.

For the _Oration,_ I am so elated with your goodwill that I begin
to fear your heart has betrayed your head this time, and so the
praise is not good on Parnassus but only in friendship.  I sent
it diffidently (I did send it through bookselling Munroe) to you,
and was not a little surprised by your generous commendations.
Yet here it interested young men a good deal for an academical
performance, and an edition of five hundred was disposed of in a
month.  A new edition is now printing, and I will send you some
copies presently to give to anybody who you think will read.

I have a little budget of news myself.  I hope you had my letter
--sent by young Sumner--saying that we meant to print the _French
Revolution_ here for the Author's benefit.  It was published on
the 25th of December.  It is published at my risk, the
booksellers agreeing to let me have at cost all the copies I can
get subscriptions for.  All the rest they are to sell and to have
twenty percent on the retail price for their commission.  The
selling price of the book is $2.50;  the cost of a copy, $1.26;
the bookseller's commission, 50 cts.;  so that T.C. only gains 74
cts. on each copy they sell.  But we have two hundred
subscribers, and on each copy they buy you have $1.26, except in
cases where the distant residence of subscribers makes a cost of
freight.  You ought to have three or four quarters of a dollar
more on each copy, but we put the lowest price on the book in
terror of the Philistines, and to secure its accessibleness to
the economical Public.  We printed one thousand copies:  of
these, five hundred are already sold, in six weeks;  and Brown
the bookseller talks, as I think, much too modestly, of getting
rid of the whole edition in one year.  I say six months.  The
printing, &c. is to be paid and a settlement made in six months
from the day of publication;  and I hope the settlement will be
the final one.  And I confide in sending you seven hundred
dollars at least, as a certificate that you have so many readers
in the West.  Yet, I own, I sha

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